


Black and Blue Eyes

by jaythewriter



Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Alternate Universe - Follows Canon all the way up to pre interview with Tim in s1, Although Masky will be renamed in the series because I hate that name tbh, Gen, I very specifically chose 'Masky' in the tags rather than Tim, I'm not having Jay call him Masky what the heck, M/M, the rating is subject to change
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-05
Updated: 2014-08-29
Packaged: 2018-02-03 11:18:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 28,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1742855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaythewriter/pseuds/jaythewriter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Timothy Wright has been missing for several months now. Jay thinks all his leads are going dry, especially with two college friends gone missing. Little does he know that one of them is closer than he realizes-- in a way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Melting Plastic

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning for missing persons situations and flames.

Timothy Wright has been missing for several months, according to public record.

That’s what Jay discovers when he attempts to go searching for him in the hopes of prying some answers out of him ¬about his long lost friend Alex Kralie. 

Going by the tapes and what’s on them, Tim and Alex didn’t exactly get along, instead choosing to take snipes at each other onset. Entire scenes were often ruined because Alex /had/ to stop Tim and point out that he was being, in fact, the worst actor the face of the Earth has ever seen. 

But he was still close enough to Alex that in some of the tapes that Jay chose to keep to himself, the two would actually smile at one another occasionally. The pair of them would joke about lack of sleep and terrible fashion sense and even Alex’s writing leaving something-- a lot of somethings-- to be desired. 

So Jay had hope, enough hope that if he tried hard enough, he might find Tim and he’ll still remember the man that Alex was before the end of Marble Hornets’ filming.

His first attempts at finding Tim involved going through their old college website, digging up nothing there but graduation photos, presenting relieved smiles and flowing gowns that glittered underneath the blinding rays of the Alabama summer sun. 

Facebook was his next best bet. He couldn’t remember Tim’s last name for the life of him, and it was never stated on any of the tapes Jay had. So he had to do exactly what he promised himself he’d never do because it was such a fucking stupid move: go on Alex Kralie’s abandoned profile.

Simply having the man’s 2006 profile picture shoved in his face reminded him exactly why he refused to do this before. A grinning sandy haired boy with chubby cheeks painted red by alcohol looked back at him, glasses sliding down his pointed noise. Jay sees himself hovering at Alex’s side, a worn brown cap doffed over his eyes, lips peeking out from beneath the brim and hinting at a smile. It’s hard to tell with the darkness of the photo, but if one looks closely at the background, they’ll see that Alex’s arm is slung over Jay’s shoulder, holding him tight to his side.

It took more willpower than Jay wants to admit to click off of the front page and go searching through Alex’s friend list. He allowed himself the shortest glimpse of Alex’s wall while the page loaded, and indeed, it had not changed at all from the previous time he’d seen it. 

“Finally packing to move out. This part’s the worst,” the last post declared, and it vanished in a blink of white and was replaced by icons of both familiar and unfamiliar faces.

It took a bit of scrolling and much restraint to keep from snooping into profiles of girls he’d known from class, but there he was, right at the bottom of the page next to Reggie C., Tim Wright. 

Not so luckily for Jay, he hadn’t added Tim on Facebook back when they were involved in doing work for Marble Hornets. The man’s profile was on lockdown for the most part, with very few posts being shown to the public.

There was a single post though that wasn’t by him, but his mother.

“To anybody who may be coming across this page: Tim has not been seen for several weeks now. We are still looking for him and we’re beginning to get desperate. If you have anything, any info that you might think is helpful, please let us know at--”

Jay ripped out his notebook from the desk drawer and hastily scribbled down the phone number she left. 

It took a couple of tries-- he supposes that Mrs. Wright had caller ID and didn’t want to talk to a stranger-- but after he jabbed at the ‘redial’ button for the fifth time and waited through three more rings, he was confronted with an impatient huff and a woman saying ‘hello?’.

“Mrs. Wright? I’m someone who went to, uh, school with Tim for a while. My name’s Jay, and, well, I was wondering if he’s been… found yet.”

Her sudden chilly silence was answer enough.

But she did tell him more.

That Tim was acting less and less like himself in the weeks before he went missing, his eyes angrier and his words more cut to the point, sharp and jabbing like the person he was speaking to had personally attacked him. 

That he was locking himself away in his room, and showing up in the middle of the night through the front door without having ever come out from his bedroom.

That he stank of something ominous and coppery, and he never looked anybody in the eye when he insisted that it was nothing to be worried about.

Tim was not well before he left, and it’s doubtful that wherever he went, he was getting any better.

Jay promised Mrs. Wright he was going to keep an eye out for Tim, but he could tell she didn’t think his assistance was going to lead the search in any positive direction. 

(If anything, she didn’t even believe that he was going to eventually be found. Her quiet sigh and murmured ‘thank you’ didn’t ring of a grateful mother that was still hanging onto hope.)

When he closed his phone and settled back into his desk, eyes blurring over as he cast a listless gaze at the screen of his desktop, Jay came close to throwing this whole quest of his aside and going back to pretending he never meet anyone named Alex Kralie. Trying to sniff out one friend amongst all the mysterious clues he left behind was stressful enough.

Two friends, though, when he didn’t have much left to go on?

The thought refuses to quit badgering him, tensing through Jay’s muscles and keeping him wide awake long after he’s gone to bed. His notebook lies open at his side as a reminder, Mrs. Wright’s number written across the right page in barely legible blue scrawl. On top of it lies his phone, screen glowing with the late hour of two thirty three. 

He doesn’t know why he’s keeping the number and his cell phone so close when he called her earlier that day already; does he somehow expect Tim to be found and for her to report back to him?

Hell, lately he has no idea what to expect, so it could happen for all he knows.

Jay exhales into the humid air of his bedroom, rotating his head and staring through the darkness at the box of tapes he has sitting by the closet. There are still a good number of them to go through, but he’s quickly coming to the conclusion that he’s only going to come up with more questions and fail to answer any of the ones he had before.

He’s clinging to hope as best as he can.

After today, though, hearing Mrs. Wright and all the exhaustion in her voice, the way she’s given up hope when a mother ought to hope for as long as there’s still even a /small/ chance…

Shaking his head of the thought, Jay rolls onto his side and closes his eyes, squeezing them together in an attempt to keep his eyelids from sliding back open as they’ve been doing. His toes curl and uncurl restlessly, and the blankets feel strange on his bare legs, sliding against his skin and pulling shivers from his spine, but sleep can’t evade him forever.

Absolute black sneaks in front of his vision and clouds his brain, successfully pulling him under just as his door rattles.

At least, he thinks it rattled, hinges creaking and handle quaking, but he’s out before he can really question whether he should be worried about it. 

\--

Locks have never been a problem.

This one, like all the others these hands have been faced with, surrenders beneath nimble gloved fingertips. The door swings open to permit a short figure, though their presence is full and palpable, with a bulky frame and strong arms beneath a tan jacket that’s covered in ashes, dirt, and other particles that nobody weak-hearted would want to look at for very long. 

For all the mass they carry and power that surrounds them, they move across the bedroom with both silence and ease. Hollow eyes, gone dark from sleepless hours lost in the past, peer past a plastic mask, over the twin holes cut into its white face. They observe the huddled up body tucked away in bed, white blankets thin and molding around jutting bones. 

The creature’s head inclines slightly to the side.

It isn’t until the electronic clock set on the bedside table ticks up a number that they move again. They step backwards, turning toward the box and eyeing it. 

They take several slow steps towards it and drop to their knees, sliding their covered fingers between the cardboard folds of the opening. Flaps flipped up, the moonlight trickling in from the window illuminates what lies inside the box: tapes, many tapes with sloppily scrawled labels, some without. 

No time is wasted in snatching out the contents. A pillow case they have tucked into their belt is quickly filled, and the masked one stands again, makeshift bag bulging. As long as they had stood gazing at the slumbering boy across the room, they flit from the room without even glancing back at him.

They are back outside in seconds, front door clicking shut behind them and their bare feet slapping against the concrete. Night protects them from any stray bystander’s delicate gaze; they keep to the deepest of shadows, avoiding the streetlights dotted along the roads. Sidewalk breaks down into wet grass, damp with the oncoming morning’s dew. Their feet slide along, nearly sending the masked one toppling into the mud and stones before them.

Balance pushes them back upright and they freeze, head tilting back. Trees stretch out over them, branches scraping against the black and blue sky, tips brushing against the stars. 

Something about this spot is perfect to them, because they drop to the ground and immediately begin dragging their fingertips across the dirt, scraping it aside. The earth gives beneath their hands and soon there is a hollow large enough for the pillowcase to rest in, halfway buried.

A lighter hidden away in their worn jeans pocket is withdrawn and flicked, the tiny flame emerging in a burst of microscopic sparks. 

By the time the sun is making its ascent over the Earth, the pillowcase lies in ashes, threads frayed and black. Black plastic melts and melds into it, fusing the dead remains of the tapes with their final resting place. All the film upon the tapes has burned away and is left as trickling ooze, useless and unsalvageable to any who may stumble across the mess.

They sit out in the morning sun, abandoned by the one that took them out here, never to be touched by human hands again.


	2. Useless

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There was an intruder in Jay’s home last night. They take two things from him: the tapes, and his mental peace.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for casual mentions of weed and firearms, stalking, and use of a switchblade.

Jay thinks nothing of his bedroom door hanging open when he opens his eyes to the gleam of sunlight reaching his hallway. It must be an accident on his part, even if he never leaves his door open these days, never ever. After all, he went to bed with a lot on his mind, a mother’s worry-tired voice in his head and a phone clutched between his fingers.

Then, when he returns to his room holding a too hot mug of coffee, one sugar and no cream (not his tastes but it has to be on his budget), he sees it. 

The open cardboard box, shifted around from its original resting place, completely unremarkable-- except that it’s completely empty.

That coffee is now staining the rug in great brown splotches that have yet to really cool off, and Jay forgets that they’re there every time he rushes back to the room to check the closet one more time. His bare feet are painfully raw, but his focus is elsewhere, rather, all over the goddamn house instead of himself. 

He hasn’t touched the tapes once in the past two days. Jay can’t imagine that he somehow misplaced them when he hasn’t even been near or in the box for over forty eight hours. And, as he shouted to himself several times when slamming his kitchen cabinets shut after finding nothing but plates and cups there: “They couldn’t have fucking gotten up and walked away!”

When he passes past his bedroom threshold for possibly the tenth time, the thought strikes him suddenly, possibly from his hand brushing along the open door. He glances between the doorway and the box lying in torn up pieces on his bed.

“…no,” Jay mutters. But-- yes, he can’t think of any other explanation, though there are surely many better ones but he can’t figure anything else out. Someone was in his room. Somebody walked into his home, opened his bedroom door, left it that way, and stole all he had left of Alex Kralie and anything that might have led to him being found again.

The man sinks to the floor, the air sucked from his lungs. All the determination and deep focus he had a moment before is gone in a puff of smoke, with that smoke clouding into his brain and stealing away any coherence. As much as it tears into his heart to think that his investigation is now at a permanent halt…

Somebody was there with him. Someone stepped into his bedroom while he was asleep and knew he was there. They saw him and they-- god knows what they were thinking, seeing him there, unable to defend himself, limp arms and closed eyes. 

Even if this person turned out to be stronger than him or had some sort of weapon on them, Jay can’t help thinking he’d feel better about all this if they’d woken him. That would’ve been, well, not /ideal/ but definitely not as fucking creepy. 

On top of all that, what the hell did they want with a couple of tapes that are useless to anybody but Jay? They’re tapes showing behind the scenes footage for a fucking college movie, one of the worst at that, and-- yes, there are odd happenings in these tapes, static dancing across the images of long forgotten faces and pale men staring people down from afar. 

But they’re /useless/, they’re /nothing/.

Cradling his face in his trembling and clammy hands, he takes in a deep breath, feeling it expand through his shoulders and his stomach. His entire body shudders as he releases it, hot against his palms. 

There’s nothing he can do. Calling the police seems silly to him; he /thinks/ there was a break-in and that somebody stole a couple of his old home movies? Come on.

Still, Jay doesn’t move for what he’s sure is over an hour. He can’t stop shaking, can’t slow his heart rate, can’t catch his fucking breath. Hunger is what finally pulls him from his crazed spell, gnawing at the pit of his stomach. 

Life goes on regardless of the shock to his system. He has no idea what he expected; the Earth doesn’t stop for him because he’s had his peace of mind ripped out from beneath his feet. Sleep, food, water, those are all things he still needs, and he has to go get some of that now, nerves still fresh and tight in his throat.

The kitchen is completely bare save for a couple cans of soup, as he discovered after all his frantic banging around the house. Nothing substantial enough to hold him over for longer than a day. 

Unsteady feet carry Jay from the carpet to the closet, where he doesn’t even bother to shed his baggy night shirt in exchange for a more appropriate shirt. Instead, he tugs his biggest navy hoodie off a hanger and wraps himself in it, zipping up and flipping the hood over his head.

He moves quick, barely remembering to pick up his wallet from the bedside table and shove it in his sweatpants’ pocket along with his keys. Jay makes a point to check his wallet for any missing cash or cards but far as he can tell, nothing has been taken or even looked through by nosey fingers. 

A thief that isn’t even after money. What kind of psycho is this?

After peeking around the house one last time, just to be totally certain that there’s nothing hiding away and waiting for him to fuck off, Jay lets himself out. The doorknob doesn’t feel too loose under his grip, and the lock doesn’t appear to be broken; it works well enough, clicking shut when he turns the key.

Maybe they got through the living room window then, but, that would likely require breaking of glass and considering his previously bare feet, surely he would’ve noticed said glass. 

Jay shakes his head and pockets his key, turning to face the street. He doesn’t have far to go to the store, but that’s still time spent away from the house. Away from keeping watch on what’s important, away from the doors and windows and hidey holes and peering eyes--

“Hey, dude?”

Breath rushing from him in a sharp gasp, Jay clutches at both his heart and at the front porch’s railing. He whips his head around, catching sight of the younger greasy haired man next door, standing at his mailbox and sorting through the bills. Jay’s heart slows almost immediately, leaving him lightheaded and tottering on his toes. Jay has seen this guy before, he’s harmless. 

Besides, the stench of weed is rolling off of him nice and thick. He isn’t going to be a problem even if he wants to be. 

“Yeah?” Jay coughs out, regaining his bearings enough to remember how to speak. 

“You doin’ okay?” his neighbor asks, not a hint of hostility in the man’s voice. He glances towards Jay, head tilting as he gives him an onceover. Jay shuffles uncomfortably, pulling the strings of his hood. “I thought I saw somebody pokin’ around your house this mornin’.”

Jay grits his jaw.

‘And you didn’t call anybody.’

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Jay answers in a huff, whirling away and stomping down to the sidewalk. He shoves his hands in his pockets, head down, playing deaf to the other man’s nosey questions. ‘Did you see the guy? Did he have a knife? What did he look like? Big? Scary?’

He’s got better things to do than pander to some stoner’s boner for real life suspense and mystery. 

\--

The closest shop with food for sale isn’t a proper store; it’s more of a convenience stop for travelers who pass through here since no one in their right mind would want to stay longer than they had to in this agonizingly quiet part of Alabama. 

Despite its lack of qualification as a place selling real food, Jay stops in, seeing as it’s only two blocks from his home. He grabs anything off the short selection of shelves that can be cooked in the microwave and is under five dollars, crowding it into his arms until he realizes that there are baskets at the front of the store. Awkwardly shuffling back to the entrance with several shadowy-eyed tourists glancing his way, he drops his packets of ramen, soup cans, and two loaves of bread into a little red plastic basket and gets back to shopping.

He eventually makes his way to the end of the tiny box-shaped store and shoves all his food onto the check-out counter. Jay doesn’t look the bubble gum popping cashier in the eye. She doesn’t appear to mind much, glancing at her phone lying behind the glass partition while she drops all his purchases into two plastic bags. 

Not even bidding him to have a good day, she moves onto the customer waiting behind him, likely giving them the same amount of attention and care. 

Welcoming bell ringing as he opens the squawking door and lets himself back out onto the sidewalk, Jay quickly makes his way down the block, head down and heart bouncing everywhere. His throat, his chest, his stomach, it can’t make up his mind. 

What’s to be done once he gets home? It’s not as though Jay is exactly cut out to be a guard dog, should this weirdo come back for a round two. Still, if he happens to miss something because he was out of the house, he’ll tear his goddamn hair out. Not that he could do anything to stop it in the first place, with his weak arms that shiver at the slightest hint of danger and none-too-clever brain grinding to a useless stop at the worst of times.

For all that holds him back, though, Jay can’t stand the thought of going home and waiting around for someone that’ll leave him a mass of black and blue bruises. Being made into a victim once is an experience, but twice? He can’t accept that, not when he knows that he’s been made vulnerable. 

And as he comes to a complete stop halfway down the sidewalk, all bare save for himself and a stranger passing, head down and hood up just like him, he knows what he’s going to have to do.

There’s a shop, right next door to the pit stop he made quick use of. It’s small, boxy like the pit stop, though when it closes down on Sundays, it uses chains and locks to keep its doors doubly secure. 

He’s never been inside of it before, too intimidated by the burly figures that go in and come back out bearing rifles and anticipation of a good future hunt. Jay has never had any reason to stop inside in the first place anyway. He isn’t somebody who keeps a gun around the house ‘just in case’ as he’s heard of so many people doing in this fucking crimeless area. 

But now, as he turns on his heel and walks that much taller in the other direction, he thinks that maybe, those people aren’t so paranoid. 

\--

It’s a switchblade. Black sheath, tiny, fast, immediately shows at the call of the silver button and pointed at the end. 

Jay didn’t want a gun in the first place. Too much learning, too much responsibility, too many laws and check-throughs. Every time he imagined himself holding a gun, he could only see himself ending up on his ass, knocked back by the force and bullet whizzing right past his target. 

A switchblade, though, that’s different. Less force involved, counts more on his body and how swiftly he can move. Jay is small, he can dodge and weave and jab out at anyone who might try to mess with him, right? 

And what a sharp blade it is. Jay’s palm still stings from where he tested it out of curiosity, like a complete idiot. He didn’t draw any blood, but he came close enough that he’s sure the skin will be red by tomorrow.

He’s grateful for the rickety bench that sits out in front of the shop, sitting between it and the pit stop he was just in. It’s a good place to sit and wonder what the fuck he’s gotten himself into. How many other people have walked away from that front counter clutching their purchase and come to sit down on this bench, paint chipping beneath them, splinters threatening to push into their flesh? What did they think about, sitting here?

Maybe his own intruder came to rest here, holding a gun, or a blade like his. Did they look around at the surrounding homes, wondering which would be easiest to slip into without leaving a single trace of their unwanted presence behind? Did their eyes fall on his home and think, yes, this one was the best, the most defenseless?

Well, not anymore. This person, this fucking /weirdo/ who goes on and break into a stranger’s home just to take their home movies and nothing else, they’ve got another thing coming.

(That’s what Jay tells himself, anyway, to quell the shaking of his hands as he pockets his new toy.)

(It doesn’t work very well, if at all.)

Gathering up his bags, Jay hoists himself up off the bench and sets off on the path he was taking before, back down the sidewalk towards home. It’s late, past noon, and the sun is bearing down hot on his back, sweat beginning to drip beneath his hoodie. Nobody is around, likely at their jobs, something he does not have-- and apparently, the same hooded man from earlier doesn’t have one either.

Jay didn’t think anything of them before, regardless of how odd it is to see anybody out at this hour. 

But. 

They haven’t moved from this sidewalk. They’re strolling the same path as before, underneath the shadow of the average middle class homes, eyes to the ground. 

Following him. Jay isn’t imagining it. They’re fucking following him, strolling along, like it’s nothing out of the ordinary to be copying the steps of some nobody that’s just trying to get through their day. 

He tests it, because he needs to know, he needs to know he isn’t going /crazy/. Jay turns the corner, ducking into an alley between two shoddy apartment buildings, broken window glass crunching beneath his feet. Light doesn’t reach beyond the first two feet of the alleyway, leaving Jay in the shadows.

Just as he expected, the stranger comes to a stop right before him, stood at the entrance of the alley, fists at their sides, and--

Eyes ahead, at last, and Jay sees that their face isn’t their own. Twin black painted eyes stare endlessly at him, a neutral set mouth that hints of an oncoming smile mocking him for even thinking he can fight back. 

Anybody who’s wearing a mask out on the street in the middle of the day isn’t up to any good, no matter what. He has no reason to believe it’s his intruder beyond mere suspicion and a gut feeling, but even if it’s not-- they aren’t moving.

Jay’s hand snakes into his pocket and it shakes around the switchblade’s handle. Keeping it around ‘just in case’ is one thing, but using it so soon after acquiring it, using it at all, he just--

He has to, they aren’t moving, they’re still staring, won’t stop fucking /staring/--

But

He can’t breathe

His chest is filling up with something dark and oozey, tastes like blood and he can’t /breathe/, he’s coughing and his legs are giving out beneath him. The figure at the front of the alley falters, stepping towards him and, fuck, no, he isn’t going to let them near him. He waves the knife, hearing it come out with a sharp ‘shink’ sound, but 

They won’t leave

They’re on him, on top of him, hands everywhere thudding hard on his chest to his stomach all the air out of him and around his wrist-- blade, skittering across the filthy ashen ground but they find the back of his jacket and he’s dragging along, kicking at the concrete and screaming into the shadows that have become too dark. Bile chokes him and crawls its way up his throat, his vision fleeing from him or is it simply that dark now? Why so dark?

Why is there something standing there that wasn’t there before, tall and reaching, limbs unnaturally long and blacker than the sudden night that surrounds it?

Why is it looking at him when it has no eyes to speak of?

Why?


	3. Humanity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A masked creature wants nothing more than to shed the burden of this none-too-clever boy from their shoulders.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for smoking, casual mentions of blood, and a character behaving none-too-sensitively towards an individual addicted to drugs.

What to do? What to do what to do what to /do/--

They thought they’d done all they had to. It was simple: get rid of the contaminated evidence that stank of death, and the disease would not spread to the boy. Then, with said contamination burnt away and out of public view, surely that would’ve been the end of it. No more sleepless nights, no more missing people who were last seen wandering towards the woods, no mass hallucinations of the same towering dark figure. 

But they were too late. The images on those tapes, a frightened boy trying to escape from the inescapable and losing himself with each passing night spent clutching a camera to his chest? They’ve seeped into the blue-eyed one’s blood, through his overly curious gaze and into him. He saw what he shouldn’t have seen, and now it’s haunting him, wanting something nameless and horrible.

They stand with a cigarette between their lips, their true face pushed up to reach the second one beneath. Smoke trails into the air, lazily floating away to the streetlights overhead. As much as they loathe this habit, they let themself submit to it every so often to appease this body’s cravings. Stress tends to aggravate it, and so here they are, sucking on this cancer stick, stuck with an unconscious little urchin collapsed at their side. 

Jay hasn’t moved once since they caught him lurking around on the street and took him away before he could go on and get himself killed. Delicate thing, it seems; he went down easy, choking on his own blood the moment he looked at the creature. The masked one ponders whether they should’ve expected any better when the boy is hardly heavier than a large child. 

As much trouble as he’s been, they know they can’t leave him here. He’ll infect anybody he comes into contact with, and they refuse to let that happen so long as they live. 

They take a long drag off their cigarette, staring at the slumbering boy resting on the park bench. This place is familiar enough to them, having watched this boy come here every so often. He likes this bench, likes to sit here and watch the birds, watch the world go on around him while he wastes moments of his precious little life away. Birds are lovely and have their uses, but the masked one doesn’t see any point in observing them when there is work to be done.

Pointedly blowing smoke in the direction of Jay’s face, they drop the stub of ashes they have left between their fingers and scrape it out with the thinning sole of their sneaker. 

It’s long past the hour of the sun, but somebody is going to come poking around here for one reason or another. Maybe to watch the bats, since humans enjoy winged creatures so fucking much. Realistically though, the masked creature knows exactly what goes on when the light has fled from the streets. A sleeping boy Jay’s size with nothing but a tiny blade on him can’t survive on his own out here, so however tempting it might be to leave him here for the night and pick him up later… not the best idea.

Glancing around them one more time to be certain that they are alone, they approach Jay’s prone body and slide their hands beneath his arms, hoisting him to sit up first. He mumbles nonsense as he’s shifted about this way and that, then pulled to lay doubled over their shoulder. His limbs dangle and flail about uselessly with each step the masked one takes into the night, towards a place they do not call home but they do call home base, for now.

There have been many places like this one: abandoned, broken, untouched by human hands for years, and very dangerous to anybody who isn’t aware of where they are placing their weight. Of course, having so much experience with these ramshackle shacks and burnt down buildings, they know what to do and how to navigate through these perilous areas.

They grit their teeth, trying not to think of how they’re going to put up with this inelegant bird-lover and his clumsy goddamn feet. 

Ducking through the park’s entrance and into an alley that’s set between a bar full of obnoxiously noisy patrons and a restaurant that still smells of hot grease, they dart away into the shadows, reveling in the emptiness that they are so accustomed to. Jay whines against him, hands raking up the back of their jacket, but he doesn’t fully awaken. 

(Part of them worries that the faceless creature might have left a heavier impact on the boy than they originally thought. They remember lying asleep and awakening to the sun in their eyes, and their dying phone showing them a date that was weeks after the moment they laid down to rest.)

(Delicate boy, he could be suffering from the very same malady, blown over by the violent shift of this dimension.)

That, though, is something they will have to worry about later. They are home, as home as they can be in a world that they do not belong, flitting from body to stolen body just as they move from house to empty house. 

It’s a two story boxy thing, nothing miraculous or particularly beautiful, especially with a sizeable chunk of roof ripped away after a violent twister tore through the county. Paint is chipping off of the bricks, flakes fluttering off upon each breeze that passes. The lawn crackles under their sneakers as they climb it and hop up the front porch, careful to avoid the crumbling edges of the bottom two steps.

A simple peek past the whining front door is all they need to know that nobody has disturbed their hideout in their absence. Stacks of used up soup cans and beer bottles lay in the door’s swinging path; they lay untouched upon the black-- no, blue carpet, right where they left them.

Pressing their body against the wall to keep from sending the trap toppling over, they slip inside and relax immediately, unaware up until now of the huge bubble of air they’d kept trapped in their throat. 

How good it is to know there are no eyes here, curious and suspicious of masks and jackets far too heavy for this climate. Nothing here but collected cardboard boxes from off the streets the night before trash pickup, and a tattered mattress dragged in from the backyard of this very building. 

The masked one deposits their guest upon said mattress, dropping him without a second thought and walking away to let him roll around and mumble in his sleep. Floorboards creak and whine beneath their feet, every step taken with caution. They pass by one or two leg-wide craters in the ground, the wiry off-white rug frayed and giving way to jagged broken floorboards. 

They pass over into the kitchen. Pipes jut out of the walls where shadows of former appliances are splayed out, a reminder that this place once held life. Boxes of the cheapest cereal possible are scattered to the corners of the tiny room, kicked aside by careless feet after being emptied by voracious hands. 

In spite of the wreckage left behind by both their own hands and the long gone owners of the home, the masked creature likes it best in the kitchen. There, they have the view of the entire neighborhood: a space that should hold a window but no longer does sits higher than any other point in the house. Pushing aside the shredded violet drapes, they may look down and watch throughout the night.

Nobody can see them from this spot. Too high, too dark, and it isn’t as if these people are interested in what’s over their heads when what’s being handed to them is their true reason for lurking past the hours of sanity. 

Tonight, some poor sap is poking around, hoping for a fix, calling out with a cracking voice for his dealer. It’s obvious he’s new to this; he’s still wearing nice clothing, spotless jeans and a white t-shirt without any holes in it. His hair is freshly washed, and his skin is still a healthy pink. This, this just /happened/ to him, he thought he could handle a single hit and it would be the end of that. Tried it like he tries everything else because he’s curious.

Now, he clutches two or so twenty dollar bills in his sooty hands, white knuckled. That money is his lifeline. 

The masked one’s stomach turns flips at the sight of a figure emerging from across the street, pointedly avoiding the streetlights. Hands in her pockets, head down, glancing left and right and over her shoulder for anybody that may have predicted her intentions and come running after her… the tweaking man catches sight of her and the excitement is visible in the quaking of his hands. If he hangs on any tighter to his money, he might fucking explode.

Drawing out a fresh cigarette from their jacket’s breast pocket, they place it between their smiling teeth and let out a long sigh of contentment.

The night won’t be so long if its display of raw desperate humanity remains this entertaining.


	4. Static Whispers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jay's day is getting worse. First he has an intruder in his own home stealing his tapes, then he's attacked by some suited asshole in an alley along with a masked weirdo, now he's waking up in an empty house with nobody around and the most terrifying feeling that his life is about to change forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for blood, general violence, a reference to choking, body horror, and some unconscious classism on Jay's part.

_Everything is normal. Everything is fine._

_You don’t even look twice when you see that Alex has a camera for a hand._

_(His arm is a healthy tan from the shoulder down to a spot inches before his wrist. There, the skin is rotting, a deadly black and blue, stretching around the camera.)_

_(His veins are still visible and pulsing, like they’re drawing blood from the camera itself.)_

_(But everything is normal. Everything is fine. Nothing strange at all. You may look down at your own hands, at your flexing fingers and soft lively skin, and still you do not stop to think that maybe there’s something wrong with having a camera instead of what you have on the end of your wrists.)_

_“So, let’s get to it, when are we gonna start on shooting today?” you ask him, attentive as ever. You encourage him when no one else does, push him to create when he hesitates because he hasn’t managed to craft the great American award-winner yet. His parents, his actors, nobody stands by him, so quick to give up when he just needs a little bit of practice, and how can he practice when others are bringing him down?_

_That’s what you’re here for. That’s why he keeps you at his side when you refuse to go in front of the camera lens unless absolutely necessary. You’re his personal cheerleader._

_And you’re okay with that. So long as he gives you his little half-smiles-half-smirks and shakes his head when you try to joke about how well the shoot went the other day, you’re fine._

_Everything is fine._

_But--_

_He doesn’t look up at you from across his bed. His head stays bowed, the brown eyes that have been growing ever darker with exhaustion remaining fixed upon the script laid out before him._

_You clear your throat and push down the nerves. Maybe he didn’t hear you._

_(Where is this, anyhow? This certainly isn’t your bedroom. No immaculate white sheets that constantly smell of detergent from being washed twice a week, no sinking mattress that can barely contain his hardly-there weight-- nothing at all, actually.)_

_(Nothing here but them and this bed, tattered blankets, sickly green mold clinging to the edges and rusty red stains crusting the pillows.)_

_“Alex?”_

_You reach out, though your hand trembles over his shoulder, hesitating. Pushing through the nerves, you grip onto him, gentle, shaking him. Pretending he isn’t cold as death, unnatural and numbing to the fingertips._

_“Alex, are you--”_

_Dark droplets fall from his nose, falling into his lap, soaking into his tan shorts, forming small red bursts._

_“--listening to me?”_

_His head bobs back, the dripping substance from his nose trickling down his face and across his cracked lips. Greasy bangs hang in his eyes, acting as a curtain. The camera hand lifts up, robotic in its gradual ascent, moving only by the elbow._

_Your own blue eyes look back at you through the camera lens, reflected in eerie detail: wide hollow pupils and the whites nearly eclipsed._

_“Jay.”_

_He utters your name, gurgling, voice catching on the blood just as it seeps past his lips, hot, too hot, burning away his skin. Lava might as well be oozing from his mouth. Bone peeks out from beneath the dead flaps of skin before it too begins to melt into nothing._

_“Behind you,” he speaks with what is left of his mouth and jaw, and the camera tilts back._

_You can’t turn around, you can scarcely bring yourself to look away from him. Your best friend is dying in front of you, sick, so very sick and broken._

_And you don’t need to look behind you, anyway._

_You can see it perfectly in the glass eye of the camera, the moon-like head glowering through you and into him. Dark tendrils tear through the air around you, darting past you and towards his throat--_

Yet Jay is the one that wakes up choking on air.

His skull aches and seems to implode when he bolts up, dizzying himself. Ocean waves crash and weave around in his brain, rocking him back and forth until he gives in and collapses against his mattress.

At least, it should be his mattress, secured to the bedframe and not sinking beneath him.

Taking a shuddering breath, he pries his eyes open, only to find that the view isn’t all that different. He squints and blinks rapidly, all to no avail; all he can do is impatiently wait for his vision to adjust.

Okay.

He’s not at home. That much is clear. He’s not at home, in his own bed, safe. There could be other people around here, wherever ‘here’ is, not holding the best of intentions for him. This could very well be his intruder’s own home, and if he’s going to go by gut feeling-- which is all he has and so it’s all he’s going to depend on-- then he is.

Wasn’t it the middle of the day the last time his eyes were open? Summer heat was bearing down upon his back, exhausting him thoroughly, and he remembers an alleyway, and black and white.

A black and white mask, staring him down, its wearer refusing to flinch even at the sight of his switchblade.

His pulse thrums in his ears, racing through him in a panicked frenzy. Slowly as he can manage, Jay rolls onto his stomach, mattress hissing at the sudden disturbance. He glances left and right, unable to see beyond what’s directly in front of him. It /seems/ like he’s alone, but…

“…hello?” he calls out against his better instincts.

Nothing calls back to him. Why would anything call back to him if it wishes to remain hidden, though?

Jay’s throat bobs as he attempts to dispel its dryness. Careful of where he places his hands, he pushes up from the ground and fights against the shake in his knees. Standing takes far more effort than he is used to putting forth but he manages it anyway, placing both feet flat against the floor.

“Hello?” he repeats a second time. His voice cracks, scraping around in his still too dry throat. Eyes adjusting to the lack of proper illumination, he’s finding that he’s as alone as he feels; this place is barren, just an abundance of nothing.

An abundance of nothing and nails, that is. Jay counts his lucky stars that his kidnapper didn’t bother to take his shoes off before putting him to bed. It’s harsh enough feeling their insistent jab for every other step he takes.

Though, he can’t have that many lucky stars if he was kidnapped in the first place. That’s beside the point right now-- what he wants is a way out, and he thinks he’s found it. Sense flies out the window the moment he sees the front door, and he dashes for it, throwing aside any thoughts that he might be miles, /states/ away from home, but outside must be better than here.

Except, he’d like to think that, but he’s tripping over something round, has no traction, and he’s toppling to the floor. Metallic clangs ring out, and something, several somethings fall over onto him, utterly light but panic fuels him to flail with wild abandon, like these somethings are deadly and wish him nothing but harm.

“Fuck-- no!”

A cruel grip wraps around his shoulder, tugging hard and nearly pulling his arm from the socket. Jay can’t contain the scream that tears from his lungs-- he hits out at the immaculate white face that stares him down, he knows this face, recognizes it too well, but the same moment he realizes who is facing him down, his vision explodes in a white burst. Pain erupts all over his right eye and cheekbone, and he brings his arms up to cover himself from further harm, shaking and promising this person anything, /anything/ for them to let him go, please, just let him /go/.

A pressure falls against his body, arms pressing into the wall behind his shoulders, and hot breath puffing over his face. Any sense of personal space is immediately gone and thrown to the wayside.

“I cannot do that.”

It’s the creature’s voice that freezes Jay in place, where he’s curled against the wall and begging for his life. He scarcely notices the pain radiating from his cheek, too stuck on this… person? They’re a person, they have arms, legs, are human in shape, and they understood what he said and even responded.

But their voice isn’t right. It crackles and distorts, falling all /wrong/ on Jay’s ears. Televisions and radios do this when their signals are off-kilter, or their antennas need to be tugged to stand the right way.

Humans don’t make such noises.

“W-why can’t you let me go?” Jay utters, breathless. Being kidnapped is awful, one of the worst case scenarios when he is all too aware of his lack of muscle and quick wit. Trapped in the hold of this /thing/ though, this inhuman thing that stands hunched over, hands flexing as though fucking aching to wrap around his throat, that’s a nightmare. “What did I do to you? I just want to go home!”

“You can’t go home.”

Again, there’s the sheer /wrongness/ in its voice, warped and prickly. Jay wants to put his hands over his ears and curl away and wait until the creature is gone, but at the same time he has to hear more. Every time he convinces himself that he must be mistaken or that the strike to his face threw off his perception of the one before him, he hears them speak again and the world flips out from beneath him.

“But /why/? You’re not fucking answering me!” he shouts, though the masked one is kneeling right in front of him. In spite of that, the creature does not move or flinch away. If anything, they lean in closer, their body heat enveloping Jay completely.

“You’re not going to believe me if I tell you that it’s because of those tapes,” they say-- and immediately it all connects, Jay was right, this is who took them, this person was in his house while he was /asleep/ and walked right past him to take the fucking tapes. “I doubt you would believe anything that I say.”

“Aren’t you perceptive,” Jay spits, with far less venom than he actually wants. He takes a shuddery breath, touching his fingertips to the aching point of his cheekbone. It pulses, the pain spreading beneath his touch. “I’m not exactly going to trust someone who /hit/ me and, and dragged me off to-- just, tell me, what’s going on, please…”

He sinks away from the masked one, nearly lying on the floor. They rise to their feet, staring right down at him, endless eyes burrowing to a place in Jay that he never knew was there. That place squeezes inside of him and twists, a wound up cord, and it wrings tears from his eyes.

“Believe it or not, I’m keeping you safe,” the masked one says through a smile that Jay knows is there without seeing past the mask. “Do you remember? The alleyway?”

Jay forces a nod, the bobbing of his head reinforcing the pounding of his head.

“Then you remember what you saw there. That is what you’re being kept from.”

Jay does remember, however hazy the memory might be.

_(The moon-like head glowering through you and into him. Dark tendrils tear through the air around you, darting past you and towards his throat--)_

Surely, the dream was a coincidence. Seeing something that odd, of course it was ingrained into his memory, and it makes sense that it would squirm its way into his dreams.

But his gut feeling, nauseous and heaving, it’s determined to prove otherwise.

“That… what we saw,” he begins, pushing up on a single hand, the other still soothing at his assaulted cheek. “It was on the tapes, wasn’t it? I-- that was just a guy, though, his face didn’t look right, but--”

“You mean to tell me that you’re going to sweep all that you saw under the rug and say that you didn’t think for /one second/ that monster was anything less than exactly that?”

Jay becomes quiet.

(He wants to do exactly that. Sweep all of this under a rug and go back to being a nobody in the middle of Nowhere, Alabama, and do nothing. From what he can tell, there’s less of a chance that he’d be kidnapped and beaten up by a masked stranger that way. Less stress.)

(But he watched those tapes with the wishes and intentions of doing the very opposite. He wanted to find Alex, find out what happened to him, help him even, because even when Jay watched that very first tape and looked into the non-eyes of the dark figure lurking on Alex’s front porch, he /felt/ something was wrong.)

“I don’t understand,” Jay utters at last, resting his back to the wall as he inches up to stand. His stare flits constantly between the mask and the ground; he can’t bear to meet the black eyed stare but he can’t look away for too long either. “I just want to go home. What’s wrong with that?”

“That’s just it,” the one before him says, firm even through the static. They reach out and take a handful of the front of Jay’s hoodie, bunching it between their fingers. “It knows everything about you now. Your name. What you do every day. And where you live.”

“You can never go back.”

(‘It’, all this talk of an it, as though the tall creature stretched to unworldly proportions is something to be feared. How can it know where he lives? It-- /he/ saw Jay once, in an area where he never goes on a normal day. The way this freak is going on, it’s as though the suited man could see him through his computer screen.)

(But.)

(That wrongness he felt from the moment he started going through those tapes…)

(It hasn’t ebbed away. If anything, it’s stronger than ever, and for maybe a split second, as Jay meets the icy glare of the masked one before him, he catches himself believing them.)

“What’s going on in there?”

And just like that, the spell is broken. Those dark eyes tear away from Jay, blown wide. They stare at the door, tense, waiting.

“There’s someone loitering in there, think they might be havin’ a fight…”

“Let the cops take care of it. Gimme your phone.”

Hearing that sets off a switch in Jay’s head. He glances toward his only exit, mere inches away from his reach. The air is tight, stiflingly so, and he hesitates for a split second--

“Don’t you dare.”

The threat in those softly hissed words seeps into Jay and he almost obeys, for the sake of his wellbeing.

Almost.

It takes a simple shove to the shoulders and a kick to the stomach, rushing the air from his attacker’s lungs. He moves quick, jostling the doorknob hard and accidentally loosening up the screws. It topples to the floor, landing in the wreckage of soup cans and beer bottles Jay stumbled over moments earlier.

He doesn’t give it a second thought; he just runs, wild-legged down the crumbling porch and across the dew-slick lawn. The couple that heard him and that-- that /weirdo/ are still there, and they shout after him, demanding to know if he’s okay but he doesn’t even pause to give them the time of day. The farther he gets from here, the better.

This neighborhood is familiar to him, at least in that he realizes he would never come here of his own volition. Jay keeps his head down, barreling forward, across the cool concrete and past locked down shops, chains snaking around their cage-like bars. Streetlights guide him out of the dangerous parts of town and into the place he knows best.

Right on past the rest shop he was at mere hours ago, past the weapon shop that he thought would bring him the security he desperately craves, down the block--

(past the alley and he has to stop and dry-heave, an arm slung around his middle to cradle his churning stomach, nothing’s here, nothing, he’s okay, he’s going to be okay)

And he’s nearly gliding up his steps, coughing and gagging from the dry sour taste coating his mouth. He doesn’t need to use his keys. One touch to the doorknob is enough to tell him that the lock is broken. Whether it’s a gift from his masked intruder that he hadn’t noticed this morning or it was something that happened while he was out was up in the air.

Right now Jay could give a damn. He can’t breathe at all, no matter how many times he reminds himself that he’s home free. He’s home, he’s home. He’s home and the cops are going to find the masked asshole and they’re going to end up in the rear seat of a blue cruiser looking at the back of a cop’s head. After all, they’re trespassing, and they’re suspicious, poking around with their head down and their face covered up. That’s gotta be enough to earn a pair of shiny metal cuffs around one’s wrists.

Jay won’t have to worry anymore about them coming to find him.

So why can’t he stop crying?


	5. A Second Intruder

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After all of the chaos of the last few days, Jay thinks he's going to need to get away and find a nice hiding spot with Sarah. 
> 
> What he doesn't take into account is that the cause of all this trouble will find him wherever he goes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for mentions of blood, references to being attacked + murdered/kidnapped... I think that's it but if I missed anything, please let me know.

“Yeah… yeah, I just need a vacation. Uh, don’t, don’t ask how I need a vacation from being unemployed, okay? I need to get away from here is all and I’d really appreciate it if you could just work with me here.”

 

Jay can’t remember the last time he spoke to Sarah. It must’ve been one of their birthdays, really, because having such a boring-- er, quiet life often means there isn’t much to talk about. Sarah, on the other hand, being a big actress working at the biggest theatre in town, is much busier than him and he’d get it if she told him to fuck off.

 

But, being his sister, she is a little bit kinder than that.

 

“Jay, I love you, but this isn’t exactly the best time,” she admits over the phone, the speaker glitching from the force of her sigh. “I’m never home anymore, I’m basically always at the theatre. So it wouldn’t really be a vacation or any, I dunno, good family time spent…”

 

Patience is a virtue that Jay is severely lacking in. Still, he bites his tongue, just for her, and a little bit because if he starts flipping out, she’s going to want to know what’s got his panties in a bunch. That’s not exactly something he can outright tell her, not right now anyway. Scaring Sarah isn’t going to get either of them anywhere.

 

“Trust me, I need this time, and I really, really need to see you,” he insists, coming to a pause in front of his bed. His only suitcase lays open on the mattress, its contents spilling over onto the sheets. He clenches a fist, holding it to his rapidly beating heart. “I miss you, Sarah. Please.”

 

Sarah goes silent at that. Jay might as well be talking to open air as quiet as she is, though the lively reciting of lines in the background is a reminder that there is indeed life on the other side of the phone.

 

The speaker blusters out for a second time as she lets out another sigh.

 

“Fine. You can come over anytime. I won’t be home ‘til late but my neighbors won’t question you wandering around my front porch. They’ll just think I invited someone from the playhouse.”

 

The tight ball that’d settled in the center of Jay’s chest bursts at last. He very nearly lets himself fall to his knees in relief. Catching his balance with a hand propped on the bed, he nods to nobody in particular, and remembers the next moment that she can’t see him.

 

“Thank you,” he blurts out, voice tripping over a somewhat hysterical giggle. “God, t-thank you! You’ve no idea how much I need this. Honestly.”

 

“Yeah, whatever, you dork,” Sarah huffs, though he can easily dissect her words to find the fondness hidden beneath them. “I’ll see you tonight. We can talk then. I gotta get back to work now, though, okay? Be safe on the roads.”

 

“Right! I will be! Safe, that is,” Jay promises her, nodding again. “You go on and act the pants off the director, hear me? Do it, right now.”

 

He could practically hear the roll of her eyes as she hung up on him.

 

Tossing his phone aside for the moment, Jay continues to fuss over what to pack, what he needs, if he should just fucking bring every piece of clothing he owns. Embarrassing as it is, he could potentially put the entire contents of his closet into the single suitcase laying open before him.

 

If he could, he’d take the whole tiny home and stuff it into his back pocket. Jay can’t stay here so long as he even suspects that there might be someone lurking around outside his window at night.

 

Thank god for Sarah, thank everything up above that had a hand in making her his sister. Hell, thank whatever instilled this utter sense of good in her that makes her pity Jay so much that she’ll let him cower in her house while she isn’t around.

 

Any further doubt holding Jay back from stuffing his suitcase to its bursting point is brushed aside. Hangers topple down from their bars as he yanks all of his shirts and pairs of jeans from the closet and sloppily rolls them up, already grinning a bit at the image of Sarah’s disapproving frown when she sees how wrinkled his clothing became while in transit. He empties nearly all of his more private clothing into what little space is left in the suitcase; socks, underwear, pajamas, the works.

 

By the time he’s finished fussing and rushing around, he discovers that the suitcase isn’t going to shut unless he sits on it while zipping it up. That takes about a whole five minutes of tugging, scraping his fingers on the teeth of the zip, and swearing aloud at the suitcase, promising that it’ll never see the light of day if it doesn’t work with him already.

 

After that, the suitcase is as locked up and contained as it can possibly be even with the lump on the top created by the amount of hoodies inside.

 

Jay remains sitting on said suitcase, resting atop all the possessions he decided were valuable enough to drag along on this panic-fueled getaway of his. He gazes about the room, at the closet doors swung open to reveal their vacant insides and the dresser’s drawers left barren save for a sock that’s missing its identical twin.

 

This surely can’t be forever. Sarah would sooner kick him out than let him stay for any longer than a few months. It’s nothing against him; she would think that she was being helpful, motivating him to get off his ass and make a life for himself. She might do that even if she knew the truth and reasoning behind this sudden visit.

 

But, looking at his room in such a bare state, stripped down to the essential bones, it sets off a strange reaction in Jay, mostly in his stomach. He hasn’t eaten since he got home all of nine hours ago, too stressed at the prospect of being chased down and knifed to death. Still, his insides manage to grow nauseous and toss around, bending him until he’s doubled over and unable to look around his bedroom anymore.

 

(This can’t be forever. That’s ridiculous.)

 

A couple of deep breaths later and Jay is able to push himself upright again. Having solid ground beneath his feet helps as well, once he hops off of the bed.

 

It helps for a moment, at least, though maybe he should have eaten despite his nerves holding him back. Standing is harder than he thought. His head is heavy, weighing forward and pulling him to totter about on his feet. Food, water, good ideas, even with a scratchy throat that won’t be soothed no matter how many times he coughs.

 

Black and blue dots dance across his eyes, threatening to expand and blind him. Jay blinks fast, panting, breath heavy and ragged. He could have run a mile for all the tightness in his lungs. Food, he really needs food if he’s this bad, but, no, this is more than starvation if he’s falling to his knees and reaching for his throat. He. Can’t. Breathe.

 

The room blackens, color bleeding out and leaving absolutely nothing behind. Looking down at his hands shows him that he’s suffering the same fate; the faint tint of pink that was once painted across his otherwise pallid palms is gone.

 

That color might as well have been his energy. Any chance he had earlier of making a run for it is gone now.

 

A force that he could never hope to comprehend drives him to lift his too heavy head and take in the creature standing over him.

 

When or how it got in without Jay noticing, he’ll never know, but questions like that are hardly the first thing on his mind. This thing is so inhuman now that it’s right in front of him, raising a skeletal hand up that’s a sickly chalky white-- not as white as its head, though, standing out against its pitch-black suit. That head brushes against the ceiling, bending the creature slightly, forcing it to be all angles, all sharp points that could pierce Jay’s skin and bleed him dry.

 

“Please,” Jay manages. The telltale rumble in his throat is there, he must have spoken aloud. He can’t hear anything over the pounding in his ears, though, and to his horror, that pounding can’t be anything other than the slowed down beat of his own heart. Time isn’t moving as it should, and the neon blue numbers of the clock on his bedside table reflect that. They shuffle through a series of half-formed numbers, blinking in and out.

 

“Please,” he begs again. “Leave me alone, please, what did I do to you?” 

 

The smooth-faced head towering over him tilts to one side, then to the other, back and forth, like maybe the creature heard him, understood him, even.

 

If it did, it didn’t care.

 

Those boney fingers press upon his forehead, not a hint of human warmth to them. Jay closes his eyes, expecting pain to wrack through his body at any moment, expecting to black out and perhaps never wake up again, expecting many, many things that end in blood and never seeing his sister or the light of day again.

 

What he doesn’t expect is the tight grip around his ankles, tugging and taking the world out from beneath him.

 

Thinking is a total impossibility for Jay, thoughts jostled and clouded. He’s aware of being pulled from his bedroom and dragged out into the hall, and the hands around his ankles are gone, but he doesn’t process any of it properly. His body could drop through to the center of the Earth and it wouldn’t make any difference to him.

 

Forced exhaustion pulls his shoulder to the floor and leaves him collapsed and useless, limbs sprawling. Unconsciousness bites at him, threatening to overwhelm him completely. His vision remains clear enough that he can peer back into his room and see two pairs of legs: stretched out limbs, unnatural, and human ones, true to the mold.

 

Jay’s head rolls back, growing lighter and lighter. The color that was sapped out from the world is returning at last, too fast, too bright, and he nearly gives in to the rolling waves inside his stomach.

 

It’s the fleeting glimpse of a familiar mask that stops him. Still black and white against a world that is anything but monochrome. He didn’t hear them come in, but then it seems that everybody is managing to sneak into Jay’s home without detection these days.

 

Something small and orange rattles in the masked one’s hand, and they shake it at the creature hovering over them, driving it into a corner until it’s out of Jay’s view. Roaring fills the room, nothing like the roar one would hear out of a giant animal that can do nothing but bellow with its huge gaping throat. This is otherworldly and taps into every flee-based instinct Jay has.

 

He resists it and breathes, reaches out and digs his fingers into the carpet, tries to drag himself closer for the sake of curiosity- and to no avail.

 

His body gives out on him. Darkness slams into his brain like a freight train, and he’s gone.


	6. Eradication

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The time has come for explanations to be given and for intentions to be revealed. 
> 
> It's also time for Jay to consider perhaps finding a more secure way to carry his money.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for offhand mentions of fire, references to kidnapping, and maybe some internalized classism on Jay's part.
> 
> ALSO: 'Masky' is going to be renamed in this chapter and they will be referred to by said name for the rest of the story. I'm sorry but I cannot stand to use such a silly name for this character. Casual use? Sure. Stories? Nooooooo.

When somebody’s world comes crashing down around them, time still continues to crawl along.

Storms rage and tear apart the place a family called home for years. Volcanoes erupt and devour towns whole in oozing red rage and billowing smoke. Gunshots cry out at a time that ought to be spent nuzzled somewhere safe and warm, stealing away not only a life but the emotional peace of those that remain.

A masked person blips into a young man’s life and steals him away, claiming he can never return home so long as there is a monster constantly dragging on his tail.

And still, the sun continues to rise in the sky, holding that man in its warm embrace and pulling him from a restless slumber, full of dreams that contained flashes of steel and the haunting screams of people he never met.

Inhale. Exhale. The room tastes different. Fresher.

Jay opens his eyes to the glare of sunlight just missing his head upon the pillow. If it weren’t for the shape of his unwilling companion standing in the way of the window, he’d be blinded. 

Bones crackle and resist his attempt to sit up. Jay fights back against it and rubs a fist into his eye, chasing off the blurred vision. Once he’s able to see correctly again, he notices that the masked one has a reason to be by the window; cigarette smoke hangs in a shimmering cloud above their head. They gaze away from him into the golden rays of the first sun, making it a point to keep their slightly exposed face out of his line of sight. 

‘Good morning’ sounds like a good way to start off the day. With normal people, anyway, who aren’t being kept somewhat against their will. And sure, Jay is relieved that he made it through the night without waking up to discover an extra hole carved in his belly, but thanking somebody for holding back on their murderous urges isn’t something Jay does. Hell, nobody should have to do that, no matter how dire the situation.

He can’t let the air remain still and silent, though, regardless of his scaly dry throat and his fluttering pulse. The man swallows, Adam’s apple stroking up and down his throat.

“Never took you to be a smoker,” Jay comments offhandedly. 

(Sarah’s voice echoes from the backed up banks of his memory, clicking her tongue at him while Alex walks away from him and spares him a puzzled glance; ‘Even if you had a knife at your throat, you’d still suck dick at small talk.’)

(Jay never believed that the exaggerated thought might come to reality, but, here he is.)

The masked one doesn’t bother to look back at him. They lift the stubby cigarette to their lips beneath the mask, sucking deep. 

“I am not a smoker,” they say around the swirling cloud issuing from his mouth. “This body, it craves nicotine. It itself is the smoker. I cannot always ignore the cravings, lest it impede my work.”

Jay stares at the back of this stranger’s head, at their black hair sticking up at the rear of their skull after lying propped up against of the pillow. It remains unwashed, and, yes, now that Jay has a chance to be around them for more than ten seconds without being dragged away, they have a very unpleasant smell to them. It’s neglect, and stale sweat dried into clothes that haven’t been put through the wash cycle in a long time. 

After all that Jay has seen, with sneaky creatures that wander about lacking anything that can be legally called a face, he expects that he would believe anything could exist right about now. Vampires, ghouls, JFK conspiracies… 

Yet, when it occurs to him that maybe the person controlling this body isn’t exactly its owner, he doesn’t want to believe it. That sort of invasion of privacy and identity is worse than any home intrusion.

They remain silent, placing an awkward air between the two of them. Jay tries his best not to squirm, but he can’t resist, his fingers twisting and turning in his lap while he grasps for words. There’s about a million questions to be asked, and speaking so much as a single word doesn’t sound like a very good idea right about now. The masked one made it utterly clear they don’t want to be here with Jay the night before.

What does one say to somebody like this?

“…Eat.”

They speak first, gesturing with their free hand towards their bed. 

Jay blinks. He screws up his eyebrows and turns his head. Indeed, over on his companion’s bed is a mess of chips, beef jerky, and miniature on-the-go boxes of cereal that Jay hasn’t had in years. It’s hardly the most appetizing offering of food but it might as well be a feast for a stomach that is painfully empty.

“Er, you’re serious?” he catches himself asking. Jay physically pinches himself in punishment, right on the arm. He shouldn’t question such things when he doesn’t know where his next meal is going to be coming from.

Nonetheless, the masked one’s shoulders merely rise and fall, the exasperation leaving them in the form of a long sigh. They wave toward the offered food again, this time more insistently, roughly cutting their hand through the air.

Taking the hint, Jay takes his time in descending from the edge of his bed and approaching the other one. This one is about as comfortable as the mattress he slept on last night-- which is to say, not at all, but that’s not his first concern right now. What he wants to know is which cereal is least offensive without milk.

“So,” Jay begins, clearing his throat. He picks up a small red box with a dancing toucan on the front of it and tears into it, finding colorful little loop-shaped morsels. While the last time he might have eaten this cereal was when he was still living with his mother, he’s not about to complain. “Is this going to be the rest of my life now? Waking up every day in some new bed and trying to talk to you when you clearly don’t even want me here-- not to mention /you/ brought me here, but--”

“Stop.”

“Stop?” Jay asks around a mouthful of sugary starch. The stranger lets out a final long exhale, more of a sigh, a snake-like stream of grey falling from their mouth. They shut the smog out of the room along with their finished cigarette, locking the window behind it.

“That isn’t going to be what’s happening,” they reply, scrubbing at their face from beneath the mask. They adjust the mask so it sits properly, shielding their features from Jay’s eyes once they turn to meet his stare head on. “What’s going to happen is that you’re going to help me eradicate the creature we’ve been speaking of.”

Jay puts down the container of cereal in his lap and doubles over his crossed legs, taking in a deep breath to hold back his initial instinct to call bullshit. He has seen that thing twice, felt its cold touch and the crushing weight of its presence upon his blood-flooded lungs. Speaking of it as though it’s real and tangible when something like it has no right to exist is going to take getting used to, though. 

“Okay. That sounds great,” Jay says without a hint of sarcasm. The way it sounds to him, he would be allowed to get back to normal life; eating chips for breakfast and browsing the internet for hours more than the average American, all the lovely little things like that. 

“But,” he continues, tossing back a single Froot Loop as he speaks. “I gotta tell you. If you’re hoping to have the two of us gang up on it, we’re fucked. You seem like you can hold your own, but I’ll trip over the nearest pebble and ruin everything for us.”

The masked one stares blankly at Jay, as blankly as they can when their eyes are hidden in shadow. They reach a hand to their face and pinch the bridge of their plastic nose.

“This is not a matter of war, not in the way that you humans might see it,” they correct him. “No, just, no. No guns, no swords. A knife, for self-defense, as you never know who you may meet along the way, but…”

“Okay then!” Jay huffs, throwing aside the emptied container he was squeezing to the point of breaking the cardboard in half. “Okay, so, what /are/ we going to do? And, by the way, I don’t know if you’ve /noticed/ but apparently we’re a ‘we’ now, we’re on a team or something to take on something that I know nothing about because I happened to get dragged into this, and… I don’t even know your fucking name!”

It all came spilling out before Jay could think about what he was doing. His brain is empty for the first few seconds afterward, and then it strikes him that this person has made it a point to remind him that they do not like him, that he’s somehow a problem when he’s likely the more sane of the two (god, he hopes so), and, oh yeah, they have his switchblade and there’s no telling how many other deadly little shiny things they’re keeping beneath their jacket.

The man snatches a pillow from behind where he’s sitting and buries his face in it, stuck in limbo between aggravation that he has been nonstop shitting himself in fear and terror that he could possibly be /this/ stupid. 

This silence is ringing in Jay’s ears. He refuses to be the one to break it.

It takes the vague sound of feet shuffling against the carpet for him to rip his face from his cushiony hideaway, pulse thundering in his ears. 

The masked one has moved from the window to the end of the bed; not a huge difference in space, though Jay finds himself inching backwards on the bedspread to replace that little bit of lost distance between them. 

They take a handful of the thicker blanket, squeezing at it, head tilted down in thought. Jay can only hope that they can’t feel his trembling from that low down on the bed. 

“…Lazarus.”

As blank as Jay’s mind had been before, that’s nothing compared to the burst of utterly puzzled /nothingness/ he experiences hearing that out of place name. His mouth hangs open, attempting to form the question he wants to ask, but he’s got nothing. 

“It’s the name you were whispering in your sleep last night,” they explain, and for the first time since he’s met them, the stranger isn’t speaking down to him. If Jay didn’t know better, he’d almost say they sounded sheepish, hesitating after every other word.

“You are right, in your point that you do not even know my name and yet I expect this much of you,” they continue, worrying the fabric of the blanket between their thumb and forefinger. “It is unfair. But I also do not have a name. So I… suppose I shall take one for the sake of the cause. And Lazarus is what comes to mind now.”

Lazarus.

Jay tries it out, repeating the single word over and over in his head. Lazarus, a man who was raised from the dead by powers beyond human comprehension, a walking corpse-- this creature, their cracking skin, their distaste towards the needs of their body…

“Okay then, Lazarus it is.”

The man sits up straighter, pillow lying forgotten in his lap. He brushes his fingers through his sleep-ruffled hair, giving his shaky hands something to do besides grip and blanch.

“…I have other questions,” Jay says eventually, when Lazarus fails to say anything more.

“Well. Go on then,” they huff. “If it makes you feel better, ask away.”

Making Jay feel better hardly seems to be Lazarus’ first priority. Still, he isn’t about to question the change of heart. Here they are at last, willing to give him answers, and it doesn’t seem likely they’re about to be interrupted unless an insistent maid comes barging in.

“Then, what’s-- why… why the mask?” Jay asks, gesturing to the pale plastic visage. He simply thought of it as a means of hiding their identity in the past, what with the none-too-legal activities they appeared to take an interest in. But this continuous attachment to it, failing to remove the mask even whilst sleeping, he can’t see the point.

“Oh, in that case, why the face?” Lazarus counters, nodding to Jay and extending an open palm towards the boy. “Why not just take off your face?”

“Wh-- I couldn’t… I could, if I wanted to, but I don’t think it would be very pleasant--”

“Then you understand why I cannot remove mine.”

Not what Jay was hoping for, but he’ll take it if Lazarus insists on being a dick about it. He sighs and goes for a packet of knock-off chips, ripping into it with enthusiasm. Jay will need more brain food if this is going to be how the extent of their conversation goes.

“Then, okay, why are you so intent on getting rid of that thing?” Jay tries a second time. He picks out a single chip and nibbles thoughtfully at it, pondering how to put it best. “Not trying to be an asshole, but I doubt you’re doing this for noble reasons. You’re getting something out of this, I imagine.”

“You doubt my morals that much?” Lazarus questions, an unseen smirk audible in their words. “Not that you’re wrong in thinking that, but, it is a long story.”

“I think we’ve got time, or as long as your money will last while you’re paying for the room,” Jay points out. Lazarus slides their hands into their jean pockets, clearing their throat and producing the strangest noise Jay’s ever heard in his life. Nothing like the crackle of television static mixing into the rasp of a dry throat.

“Yes. My money.”

(Blood floods away from Jay’s face and he discreetly checks his back pocket for the familiar pressure there, leaning back slightly on his rump. It’s there, but he thinks he may have to check his wallet later, just in case.)

“Let’s put it simply,” Lazarus goes on, arms crossing. “The creature came after me much in the way that it is coming after you, and so long as it lives, then I can never know peace. That, too, is going to be an issue for you, as I told you last night.”

“Yeah. That.”

Jay pauses, putting aside the second course of his breakfast and burying a cough into his fist. Maybe he imagines it, but he swears that Lazarus jerks to the side when he does, flinching at the sound. 

“So, why is this thing after me in the first place?” he goes on, thinking back to every moment he spent watching those missing tapes. All he wanted was to find out what happened to his old friend; it’s not as though he went in and immediately held ill will towards the faceless man that loomed over the younger versions of both him and his old friends.

“I find it is best not to worry as to /why/ it chases down individuals,” Lazarus states, arms going behind their back and their toes bouncing some. “It’s likely for the best, considering any conclusions I draw tend to be rather horrific.”

Not the answer Jay was hoping for, in many ways. Clarity appears to be a luxury of the past now, something that Lazarus has neither heard of nor wishes to become acquainted with. At the same time, Jay squirms under the weight of their words. 

(Is that what happened to Alex? Or did he run away clinging to the most hopeless of hopes that he’d find a place that nobody could ever reach?)

“Okay, then, we’re going after something that can find me just because I happened to watch it getting caught on candid camera.”

Lazarus nods.

“It caught me without me even actually looking at it, it can get anywhere it wants, it’s… faceless, for /some/ reason.”

They nod again, gravely.

“I can’t fight. You say this isn’t something that’ll require that, and I doubt just fighting it one on one is something that can really happen. So how are you-- we, whatever, going about eradicating it?”

“The same way that I attempted to keep the creature from reaching you.”

Lazarus turns away and steps toward the rickety desk shoved into the corner of the room, beneath the wide window. They crouch down, patting out at the floor. They emerge and stand before Jay again, holding what Jay originally believed to be a pile of garbage shoved out of the way of careless feet.

Instead, it’s the blackened square of what was once a tape, edges melted and solidified into shapeless dark ooze. 

“Is that--”

“It is one of Alex Kralie’s tapes, the film torn apart and burnt into ashes,” Lazarus confirms, holding out the tape. Jay doesn’t hesitate at all, grabbing it away and turning it over. At first glance, it’s impossible to tell the tape apart from any other, generic in color and shape, but on one side is a curled piece of paper, a label. A single word remains legible: Alex’s name.

“You took the tapes from me and burnt them to try to stop that thing,” Jay says aloud, mostly to himself. “And… not to question your methods, but that didn’t exactly do much except piss me off.”

“This is true,” Lazarus responds, not without a hesitant pause beforehand. They take the tape back, tossing it into its original resting place. “But that is because you already saw the tapes. You looked too deeply into the matter. The lucky thing about all of this is, nobody is going to look twice at a suited man, not often anyway. You, on the other hand, looked closer, got too curious…”

“And so I’m being punished for it,” Jay huffs. Lazarus shoves their hands into their jean pockets, fingers visible through the unpatched holes.

“Not punished. Curiosity is a valuable thing. In this case, it’s just…”

Lazarus’ shoulders rock up and down, pushing a sigh from their lungs. 

“Kid. Jay. You and I are both infected. We need to destroy any and all evidence of this creature until it’s too weak to go after me, you, and any others that happened to be unfortunate enough.”

They stare into the floor, endless eyes giving away absolutely nothing. Jay sits with a ramrod straight spine, lip between his teeth, waiting for the prank, waiting for Lazarus to rip off the mask and reveal themselves to be Sarah or one of her friends surprising him with a sick birthday joke. Even if it’s nowhere close to his birthday and it would be the worst sort of prank since the dawn of time, it’d be preferable to being chasing after an unattainable goal for the rest of his life, supernatural forces bearing down upon him, waiting around every dark corner.

The other shoe never drops.

Jay lets out a long shuddery breath and nods his head once, giddy clouds rolling into his skull at the forced movement.

“I don’t really have any other choice, do I?”

Lazarus makes a peculiar noise that sounds like it ought to be a laugh, but the combination of the mask muffling them and the static residing within their throat distorts it into something indescribable. Jay shivers, looping his arms around himself in a loose hug that does nothing to soothe the pounding of his heart.

“You are right. No other choice. Either you help me, or I must kill you to prevent further spread of the disease.”

That, Lazarus did not mention before. Yet, after all that they’ve said, those words don’t affect Jay in the way that they might have a couple hours ago. Jay expects such things from them now: threats at every turn, sidelong warning glances, and outright declarations of intentions to murder.

He doesn’t want to think of what that means for him. In too deep already, too tired to care, it doesn’t fucking matter, because he nods and lets himself drop back against the pillows. 

“Okay. Fuck. Okay. When… when do we start?”

Lazarus hums in approval, lifting their head and turning their blank black gaze upon Jay. If he could see past the mask and into their true-- rather, /their vessel’s/ face, he’s sure it would be smiling.

“Tomorrow. After you regain your strength and recover from the past few nights’, mm, fun.”

Right. Fun. Is that what the masked one considers fun? Kidnap, several attempts on an innocent person’s life, having their world turned upside down on them and finding out there’s truly something out there that watches them from the shadows?

Jay shakes his head and rolls onto his side, exhaling heavily into the pillows that smell heavily of cigarettes.

Maybe if he tries hard enough, he’ll wake up from this and find he’s still back in his room, waiting for the day to start, surrounded by the blacks and blues of the lightless night.


	7. On the Road

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gut instinct pushes Sarah to investigate just where her brother vanished off to-- and said brother sets off on the first step of his not-at-all-his-idea quest.

“Jay. I don’t know if you’re late, or if you couldn’t make it or if… if you called and I just missed it and my phone is being a piece of shit. But this is the fifth time I’m calling and you haven’t picked up. What the hell is going on? Get back to me already, will you? Please. I’m getting-- just, call me back as soon as you get this message.”

 

Sarah ends the call, heart sinking at the hollow beep her phone emits.

 

It’s past midnight. She ought to be in bed, resting up for tomorrow’s practice and maybe thinking about heading out shopping, especially if there’s going to be an extra mouth around the house. Something besides microwave meals, no noodles, vegetables and anything that comes off a tree. If Jay has been as bad as she has, both of them are in need of a serving of leafy greens or two.

 

The longer she sits awake in bed though, staring at her glowing neon clock and unconsciously twirling her long mud brown hair between her fingers, the more her stomach sinks under the weight of unease.

 

She’s tempted to call it a night and nuzzle up in her blankets already. Jay’s never been good about returning calls in the first place; he sometimes forgets that he has a phone at all. In all likelihood, she’s getting fussed over absolutely nothing, and that boy’s phone is still at his apartment, deserted in the wake of all this sudden vacation-needing madness.

 

Intuition is a powerful thing, though. It sits sharp in her chest, poking at her when she leans over to switch off her bedside lamp. Sleep evades her, like it knows that there are more important things to be doing right now. Her eyes aren’t even a little heavy, and soon her legs are hanging over the edge of the mattress, bare toes brushing against her floorboards.

 

Sarah reaches for her phone one more time.

 

She scrolls down her contacts, back to Jay’s name. A green button containing the shape of a phone glows underneath her thumb, waiting. For the sixth time tonight, she taps it and holds the speaker to her ear, heartbeat thrumming after each ring, at every pause that might be Jay picking up.

 

“Hey, it’s Jay. I’m not here right now, so if--”

 

Sarah tosses the phone onto the bed with a flick of her wrist. The rest of Jay’s words are distorted and muffled by the sheets; she doesn’t need to hear them again. By now, she can recite his whole message by heart.

 

She doesn’t bother getting out of her tank top and pajama pants for her late night venture. For now she shrugs into her favorite jacket, the one that’s fluffy and white on the inside but plain teal on the outside. Grabbing her wallet and her keys out of the ceramic pink tray on her work desk, she darts out of the bedroom and right out the front door without so much as a glance back at the rest of the house.

 

Maybe she was meant to head out on this trip. Earlier that day she had dropped by the gas station, deciding to fill up her clunky old blue truck despite it being at a half tank. She usually waits until it’s lower than that, but as she locks herself into the truck and cranks the engine to life, she couldn’t be any more grateful to her past self. Jay lives hardly more than two hours away, but it’s a fair enough distance that Sarah would’ve worried about clunking out in the middle of Fucking Nowhere Road at two thirty AM.

 

The woman hesitates one more time, hands caressing the steering wheel. She wants it to be nothing, this strong certainty that something is wrong. It’s Jay, forgetful old Jay, being an idiot and foregoing filling his car up on the way over and abandoning his poor phone back at his dinky little apartment.

 

But it’s been over six hours since he called.

 

He can act like one, but he’s not a total idiot. He would have figured out a way to let her know what was going on.

 

That’s what pushes her to switch the car gear into drive and to rip out of the driveway, headlights cutting through the night and showing that she’s as alone on these roads as she expected to be.

 

\--

 

“Up.”

 

Through the haze that announces his arrival to wakefulness, Jay hears Lazarus’ approach, heavy footfalls and aggravated huffing. The boy rolls to lay on his back and sit up, but apparently he doesn’t react quickly enough. A heavy-- something-- lands upon his chest, knocking the breath from his lungs and pulling him from a dreamless sleep to harsh reality. The boy gasps for air and scrabbles at the weight on top of him--

 

And sends his suitcase harmlessly toppling to the floor. He rubs at his breastbone, imagining the huge purple bruise that will bloom there later.

 

“You didn’t have to nearly kill me this early in the day, did you?” Jay mumbles, hardly intending for Lazarus to hear him. Nonetheless, the masked one scoffs and points at the fallen suitcase.

 

“Get dressed. We’re leaving right away.”

 

Jay would ask how the little beast managed to carry both him and his overloaded suitcase from his home to this disgusting motel, but at this point he doesn’t even want to know. He does as he’s told, fighting against the dizzying exhaustion still sitting firm in his brain. Swinging his legs off of the bed takes longer than it has any right to.

 

Whatever outfit Jay picks out, he’s sure it doesn’t match whatsoever, but he could care less. What he /does/ care about is being able to dress in privacy, and he pointedly locks the bathroom door behind him when he heads in. He can hear Lazarus on the other side, unusually close-- more like uncomfortably so.

 

“So you mean to tell me you checked out of this place while wearing your face, then,” Jay comments in the hopes of annoying them away.

 

It must work, if that crackly growl is anything to go by.

 

Now that he’s standing in the bathroom while there’s light, he’s finding that he was right to assume it was a mess. The shower curtain smelled of mildew, the mirror didn’t look as though it’d been cleaned in the past few months, and there was a pile of dark hair trimmings dusting the inside of the sink basin.

 

He shudders, tugging on a too loose pair of jeans with hurried hands. If he has to spend one more moment longer in this room, he might scream. Wherever Lazarus might want to drag him, he prays to whatever higher being might be listening that it’s somewhere a bit more sanitary.

 

Though, if there is a holy power watching over him, it hasn’t been doing a very good job as of recently…

 

Banging fists from the other side of the door startle Jay just as he’s halfway into his shirt, too heavy for Alabama weather but he didn’t have time to grab anything better suited for it.

 

“Hurry, would you?”

 

“Fuck off, I’m almost done!” Jay yells back. His head is pulled to an uncomfortable angle as he fights to straighten out his neck and get through the shirt collar. Apparently being ensnared within one’s clothing grants them a touch of bravery; Jay’s instantly regretting his smart mouth once he pushes his head through to the other side.

 

Lazarus doesn’t appear to give a damn. When Jay comes back out of the bathroom, he sees they’re too busy hauling his bag to the door. They don’t spare him a second glance, grunting their way past the threshold and out into the hall.

 

“W-wait--”

 

If there’s anything he forgot in the room, it’s left behind for the maids to take for their own. Jay bounces on one foot out the door, attempting to shove his shoe onto the other.

 

“S-so what,” he stutters to Lazarus’ retreating back. “Are we gonna walk everywhere? I doubt this little quest of, uh, yours is going to be very good for carrying around a very heavy suitcase.”

 

The masked one pauses, their breath heavy. They turn their head and stare for a long moment at Jay, silent.

 

“Have you never driven a vehicle, Jay?” they ask eventually, before turning back to the elevator they were inching their way towards. Jay sputters, opening his mouth and closing it several times before he shrugs and shuffles up beside Lazarus to wait for the metal doors to slide open.

 

“I have. I just. I saw how you were living and I’m guessing you don’t have a home, so you might not have a car or whatever…”

 

“There is a car involved in all of this. Believe me,” Lazarus assures him, gazing straight ahead. “Assumptions will get you nowhere.”

 

Jay nods, releasing a shaky breath he’d kept bottled up in the pit of his chest. He sees himself staring through the reflective metal walls of the elevator, sees the circles turning the soft skin beneath his blue eyes black. After all the sleep he’s been getting, he’s still resembling something akin to a vampirized zombie.

 

He reaches and scrubs a palm down his stubbly face. All he can hope for now is that once they make it out to the parking lot, he won’t find out that it is in fact his car they’re taking. Lazarus hasn’t been shy about using what belongs to him so far.

 

Apparently being a team means that everything that’s his is also theirs. Does that mean he owns those knives they’re keeping wrapped up in their jacket? Jay doubts that that’s the case, but maybe sometime he’ll remind Lazarus that they weren’t the one who went out and spent all their hard-earned cash on the shiny new switchblade they’re keeping hidden away from him.

 

A faint ‘ding’ announces the pair’s arrival to the first floor of the hotel building. The elevator doors chug apart, permitting the two of them to step out. Jay lingers behind Lazarus, letting them guide the way towards the front entrance. It isn’t until they’re passing by the reception desk (complete with a half-asleep woman clutching a cigarette between her fingers and a broken bell at her side) that Jay has to ponder…

 

“I didn’t think of it before, but,” Jay begins at a low whisper, hunching over to be closer to Lazarus’ ear. “How did you get me in, exactly, when I was passed out?”

 

They continue to look anywhere but at Jay, trudging past the desk and dragging the suitcase with such purpose, one would think it was their mission. A muscle comes to life in Jay’s jaw, twitching away.

 

“Uh, okay, don’t answer that, but, I highly doubt they let you check in while wearing that mask.”

 

“If you /must/ know,” Lazarus strains out, shouldering the glass pane door leading outside open as they speak. “I was not wearing the ‘mask’ when I checked in. You were also standing with me, albeit half conscious, but this place has seen its share of junkies and the like in the past, so you were not an issue or in any way conspicuous.”

 

Jay blinks, pulling at the strings of his memory bank. Nothing about that plain little lobby stuck out to him, not the tears rippling across the vomit green carpeting nor the clanking noises that the elevator made as it carried them down. Half conscious or not, wouldn’t he remember all of that?

 

He shivers. Not once in his life has anyone ever said to him that he has a good sense of memory. But this, this is more than that, more than forgetting to take his phone out of his pocket during laundry or leaving the car keys in the refrigerator. This is whole chunks of time missing from his life that he doesn’t think he’ll ever get back.

 

Breathing in deep, Jay claws his way back to the here and now and looks around at the parking lot. For a place that can’t be boasting more than two stars at the most, the number of nice expensive cars that are dotted around here isn’t a low on one. He is willing to bet that he slept in the same building as one of Alabama’s leading politicians last night.

 

Squinting past the gleaming morning sunlight reflecting off of the windshields, Jay quickly comes to the conclusion that his car is not among those parked here. Instead, Lazarus is wobbling their way towards a silver Volkswagen, holding the suitcase handle with both hands and resting it against their front. They pull a silver key from the inside of their jacket, unlocking the trunk and heaving Jay’s suitcase inside.

 

The trunk shuts too quickly for Jay to get a good look at what’s inside, but he doesn’t think he sees any changes of clothing in there for Lazarus. If they expect to share clothes with Jay in the future, they’ve got another fucking thing coming.

 

It occurs to Jay then that Lazarus might just hop in and lock Jay out of the car before driving off into the morning sunrise with his suitcase. Wouldn’t make them the thief of the year when the suitcase’s contents don’t hold a ton of value, but Jay still stumbles over his own feet trying to get to the passenger side door anyway. He hangs on tight to the handle, refusing to let the masked one putter off without him-- though after looking inside past the strangely clean window, he sees the lock is already undone for him.

 

He doesn’t dare look Lazarus in the eye as he opens the door and lets himself inside, finding that the seat is clear along with the footwell-- and the entire backseat as well, save for a few candy bar wrappers.

 

Maybe Lazarus really did steal the car, fresh off the lot. At the same time, though, Jay doubts he has many strikes left in this whole ‘ask a stupid and invasive question in terms of Lazarus’ criminal life’ situation. So, he keeps his mouth shut and buckles up, eyes on the windshield, the floor, anywhere but the masked one twisting the key in the ignition.

 

“I intend on taking you to an area not too far from here,” Lazarus says, as they take the wheel and twist out of their parking space. For somebody that makes walking straight look like it takes too much effort, they drive just fine, keeping both hands on the wheel and steering slowly. “It is an empty home, already feeling the effects of the virus, but I hope to make it so that nobody else who stumbles across it becomes inadvertently infected.”

 

Jay hums in acknowledgement, too caught up in investigating their surroundings. He doesn’t recognize the area they’re in; it might as well be a carbon copy of any rural area in Alabama. An overabundance of trees at the sides of the road, a noticeable absence of human life, and wilting shacks out in the middle of nowhere lying half in shambles, shadows of their former selves.

 

Nothing out of the ordinary, not a single street sign around to help pinpoint Jay’s exact location.

 

He doesn’t have the courage to ask. One can only handle so many withering looks at once in the small opening hours of the morning, and getting answers out of Lazarus is like tugging teeth.

 

So, Jay is quiet, and Lazarus is quiet too. They are quiet for hours, drifting through the empty streets slowly being painted a sweet gold by the rising sun. No words, no direct eye contact, nothing that indicates they are aware of one another despite sitting in the same car, side by side.

 

For now, Jay finds that he wouldn’t have it any other way, even with his thirst for answers.

 

\--

 

_Orange dust particles float in front of the windshield, illuminated by the far reach of the setting sun, losing its bright yellow colors to the passage of time._

_Wind combs through your hair, billowing it out behind your head. The windows are all open to permit the blustery air inside, and this car can’t be going any slower than forty miles an hour. Music plays as an underscore to the rushing in your ears; you can’t properly hear the words or recognize the song with the chaos of the world around you but you still can pick out the guitar chords every so often._

_You sigh, filled, overwhelmed, and relaxed all at the same time. If not for the wind, you’d likely be falling asleep underneath the cozy blanket of heat the sun has generated with the uncovered car being out beneath it._

_A sudden urge wins you over, and you slide your arm out of the window, elbow leaning where the window is rolled down and hiding away. Opening your hand, you let the wind assault your palm, lifting it into the air entirely on its own. Parting your fingers sends it flying back further, and closing them again steadies your hand somewhat._

_There’s no end to this road, though you can’t bring yourself to worry or care. All you need is your hand sailing on these gusting winds, the sun lighting the path before the car, and the rest of this day._

_You turn your head, a grin playing at your lips as you look at the man beside you, gripping the steering wheel with tense hands that read of unfamiliarity. Towards what, you don’t know, but it’s definitely nothing to do with you. When he turns his head and looks back at you, his usually neutrally set mouth quirks up at the side, and your insides jump for joy at such a victory._

_Nobody gets Tim to smile just like that-- unless the someone is Brian, but he is a very special case. Anybody who looks at Brian can’t help smiling._

_He’s utterly human right now, dark hair bursting out behind his head and pulling his eyes into view when he has the tendency to let his bangs grow in a little too thick these days. He knows about as well as you do as to where you two are going, and he’s obviously more bothered by the uncertainty, his blanched knuckles giving everything away right there._

_But he’s happy to be there with you, and you’re happy to be there with him._

_That’s enough._

_Tim turns his attention back to the road, still unchanging in color and emptiness, as though everybody else in the world forgot that this road exists. He pushes his foot down on the gas, jacking it, and suddenly the wind is too much for your hand and you have to pull it back in. Your head is shoved up against the back of your seat, and you can’t stop laughing._

_Maybe you’ll never stop, just as this road has no end._


	8. The World Spins Madly On

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Three slowly breaking people take on the day:  
> Sarah makes it to Jay's home, and finds that she has come a little too late.  
> Jay acts under Lazarus' orders and discovers an object that is more wicked than he could imagine.   
> Lazarus wishes they could burn their memories in the way that they burn their way through the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for fire (nobody burning), and portrayal of an abusive relationship (this pretty much applies to the rest of Lazarus and Jay's interactions so consider this a full-cover warning). I may have missed some. Please let me know if I have.

Sarah breathes in the acrid cloud of smoke before she sees it.

It's not uncommon for there to be tiny bush fires around here. Dry branches and cigarettes thrown out open car windows make for a lethal combination at times. That's what she chalks all the fuss up to at first, and she continues to tell herself that the closer she gets to Jay's home.

The energy she wastes clinging to denial putters out by the time she hears the sirens. 

They’re far off at first, their presence more of an annoyance than anything else. She’s more focused on making the right turn; she’s close to where she needs to be and if she ends up driving down one more wrong street, she’ll lose her fucking mind.

Then she sees it: the pillar of curling black clouds, seemingly stretching onto the high heavens. If it weren’t for the rising sun on the horizon, she wouldn’t be able to see it. A band of sunlight presses frantically against the twisting smoke, as though attempting to contain it, although to no avail. 

The sirens are louder, too loud, and they’re rattling her fucking skull as a solid wall of red brushes past her wimpy car, causing it to shake so hard she has to slam a foot on the brakes. 

Her heart somewhere between her throat and where it ought to be, she sits in the middle of the street, undisturbed, watching the fire truck wail its way down the winding road. As predicted, it turns onto the offshooting road from where all the smoke is coming from-- and what Sarah doesn’t want to admit to herself is that the truck is going for Jay’s neighborhood.

It’s harder to admit that the smoke is coming from right where she thinks Jay’s home is.

Suddenly she can’t get the car to go fast enough. Her foot cramps up from the pressure she’s placing on the gas pedal, but she powers through it, making the turn just in time. Tires screeching in protest, she rushes down the street and it’s just as she thought and god she has to be seeing things, this can’t be happening to her baby brother, to /Jay/, poor Jay, who never even touched a match in his life for fear of setting the whole world ablaze. 

But, too bad, it is his place that the fire truck stops in front of, coming to a squawking halt. 

Great ribbons of orange rip through Jay’s windows, glass lying upon the concrete in thousands of tiny pieces. The smoke belches through the new holes the windows left behind, curling into the air and devouring the building. From the ground, what was once bricks and wood looks like a black cloud nailed to the sidewalk.

Sarah doesn’t bother to park her car. She tears the keys from the ignition and trips out onto the street, the chilly night air warped into something hellish from the heat rolling off of the burning building. Sweat forms upon her brow and seeps down her reddening face, colored both by stress and the flames threatening to come shooting out into the open.

Firefighters are pouring out of the truck as she approaches, expediting the work to one another-- one goes for the nearest fire hydrant, hose in hand, helped by a friend, and a second pair marches down Jay’s front door, slamming it down with their body weight alone. They rush inside, swallowed up immediately by the darkness. 

Neighbors have come to rubberneck and stare in half asleep confusion at the spectacle. One of them is even clutching a mug of coffee and standing in their robes, as though this were a morning show put on just for them. Sarah wants to fucking knock that mug in their face and give them the third degree burns they deserve, but she’s got something far more important on her agenda now.

“Hey!” 

The nearest firefighter hears her demanding cry for attention. They narrow their eyes from beneath their helmet and extend a heavily armored arm, covered in yellow fabric that’s surely meant to keep flames from reaching their skin.

“Stay back, ma’am,” they order, not cruelly but still, her first instinct is to take insult and rush their arm, throwing her full body weight on it. She won’t be ignored. They bat her back again, pulling a gasp from the surrounding crowd of strangers. 

"Ma'am, please! This whole area is dangerous!"

"My brother lives here!" Sarah shouts, louder than she thought she was capable of. Her throat aches, broken into pieces. “Tell me right now, is he still in there?!”

The firefighter stares at her, jaw momentarily slack, and for a moment she thinks she can see past the plastic visor over their face. What she sees is sympathy, and her insides are all awash in sickening adrenaline. She could rip down this crumbling house and she wouldn’t be surprised.

“L-listen, listen,” the firefighter whispers, coming down close so that she can better hear them through the visor. “All I know is that the call didn’t come from inside the house. This was from one of the neighbors or someone nearby, I don’t really know for sure. But if he’s in there, my buddies are going to find him, okay?”

Sarah’s lips tighten into a firm line, but she can’t think of anything more to say. This person can’t do any more for her-- they go to unravel the rest of the hose and soon she’s out of the way, clutching at the front of her jacket and her knees quaking beneath her.

She’s trying to ignore Jay’s car. She really does. But if it’s still there--

He’s still inside he’s there if his car is there and she’s just standing /near/ the flames and she’s practically falling over and--

And they’re coming out, with only themselves. 

If her stomach wasn’t empty, she would be heaving everything within it out onto the concrete. She leans against the truck, gulping air into her lungs, choking on the taste of the smoke that still remains even after the hose has been turned on the fire. 

She wraps her arms around herself, doubling over and hearing a sound that she doesn’t understand is herself wailing until she feels eyes bearing down upon her back. The sound is drowned out in the harsh hiss of the blasting hose, turned into a faint squeak that can’t possibly contain all of what’s killing her, right here and now. 

Stones dig into her knees, and at some point, there are arms around her, dragging her away from the scene. She doesn’t fight it, there’s no reason to now. Her limbs hang limp, and she lets this strong person-- the firefighter, it’s them, the one from before-- prop her down on the hood of a cop car that pulled up during the beginning of all this chaos. Something heavy slides around her shoulders, capturing all the sun’s heat and sucking more sweat from her skin. 

Hours must have passed by the time that she realizes she’s got a shock blanket draped around her shaking body. The sweltering heat from the burning house is gone now, though the smell still remains, singeing her nostrils and making her nose curl.

Clutching the blanket to her body, she slides off of the cop car, reexamining her surroundings. The rubberneckers have fucked off, having gotten their daily dose of neighborhood drama. Fuckers. Somebody could be dead. Somebody important to a sister, to friends, somebody precious and wonderful in his loyalty to those who love him.

Her breath comes in shuddering puffs as her eyes settle upon a gathering of two firefighters and a single cop. Snatches of conversation slip out between crackly orders given over tinny radio receivers and the hum of the fire engine’s purring engine.

“…no bodies, though, not even a dead rat.”

“Would you say it’s an arson? Nobody smelled anything on the air before the blaze broke out, I asked around.”

“Don’t know, it’s too early to tell. But if I had to garner a guess, I’d say yes. Some of the neighbors have seen a stranger lurking around the home for the past few nights. They wore a mask and kept followin’ the kid who lived here around.”

“Really? And nobody called you guys over that?”

“Nope. They didn’t want to assume or start a commotion or anythin’.”

“Fuckin’ hell. They always call too late, don’t they?”

“You’re tellin’ me, this is how these shitheads get away with everythin’. People see shit, nobody says shit, shit continues to go down uncontained…”

Sarah can’t put her finger on what it is that has her turning away from them and walking away, straight towards her car where it sits abandoned in the middle of the road. She ought to stay for questioning, so that maybe the cops can track Jay down, but from what she can see, they know as much as she does.

The car door swings open and permits her inside, keys waiting for her in the ignition. She doesn’t flip the switch just yet, choosing to cling to the steering wheel instead. Her hands are numb to the blister-inducing heat radiating from the leather cover, having sapped up the afternoon sun’s rays. 

Again, intuition is a powerful, powerful thing. It’s saved Sarah hundreds of times.

A thunderstorm looks odd, and nobody else is reacting to it because what’s another storm to this town? But she just /knows/ to get everybody in the house underground, right before the twister touches down and devours anything and everything within its path.

Weirdos at the bar, jonesing around for her number? She hands them a call line for a nunnery and takes off for home. 

Her dad calls up out of nowhere, wanting to get together. The moment she hears his voice, she can tell it’s bullshit. If she agrees to meet up with him, she’ll be leaving with a considerably emptier wallet. She makes up a date for them to meet near the old house that she and Jay both abandoned a long time ago after playing witness to the messiest divorce this side of Alabama, and never shows up. 

Intuition saved Sarah, every single time. For all that she knows, it saved her fucking life, more than once. 

Right now, she’s beginning to think that it will save her brother’s life as well.

If there isn’t any hint of a body in that desolate black skeleton of a building, then he wasn’t there, even if his car is parked in the front. He’s wandering around elsewhere, maybe unaware that his whole life has gone up in an all-consuming blaze. 

He isn’t answering his phone. His home is gone. No body. No idea of where he could have gone.

The one thing she’s sure of: He’s out there somewhere.

And she’s going to find him and figure out what is coming after him. 

Sarah closes her hands around the steering wheel, and the tires screech out a horrid song upon the gravel. Cops call out after her a moment too late, too stuck on the confusion of the mysterious blaze to notice her escape until she’s around the corner.

She presses her foot down onto the gas pedal, hard.

\--

Slam. 

Jay’s skull cracks against-- something hard, goddammit-- and white fireworks wink behind his eyelids, following the flow of the pain as it travels across his forehead. 

“The brakes!” he gasps out at his car companion. His palm presses into the assaulted spot, rubbing in circles, providing very little relief from the pain. 

“Should have put on your seat belt,” Lazarus mumbles beside him, clicking out of their own belt. Mirth drips thickly from their words, past the static that continues to play games with Jay’s ears. It takes too much of Jay’s barely there energy to hold himself back from throttling the bastard. They take far too much joy in his pain.

It’s already done, though, nothing he can do about it, and, yeah, he supposes he probably could have strapped in, but, again, already done with. Not that he’s bitter or anything.

Lazarus twists the keys from the ignition, taking them out and slipping them into their jeans pocket. Curious, Jay turns in his seat and squints out the window, past the setting dusky sun. Nothing out of the ordinary stands out to Jay here: it’s a fairly standard neighborhood, children playing games of pretend using tree branches and old couples shuffling back into their homes.

One such couple is making their way back from the building Lazarus parked in front of. An aged woman clutches a faded doll to her chest, wrinkly hands clasped around its torso, the powder blue dress worn at the edges and its hair fraying. Jay knows it came from this building-- such an old doll could have only come from an antique shop. 

Like the neighborhood it’s situated in, the shop isn’t in any way remarkable. Paintings hang in the front windows, and another doll similar to the one the lady held sits at the front door, holding a sign upon its lap declaring that the shop is open for business. Nobody else is drifting in or out of the store save for a single teenager that might be an employee, puffing on a cigarette and glaring at her surroundings. Clearly she believes she has somewhere better to be.

“So… okay,” Jay begins, lips forming a thin impatient line. He turns his puzzled stare upon Lazarus, one eyebrow quirked. “Antique shop.”

“Observant,” Lazarus nods. They fix their endless stare upon Jay, or they could be looking past him and at the shop; fucking mask makes it impossible to tell. Jay has to resist the urge to rip it off their face, shoving his hands down his hoodie’s pockets instead.

“Yeah, thanks, I try. What are we /here/ for?”

Lazarus, as Jay expected, gives no immediate answer. They go digging in their pockets as well, searching deep past the mess of food paper wrappers and little white somethings that resemble bird bones too much, far too much. Jay averts his eyes, head down and looking into his lap as those tumble to the floor.

A moment of searching later leads to Jay being prodded in the arm by a leather wallet, folded up nicely. Jay’s immediate thought is that there’s no way in hell Lazarus didn’t steal it; it’s too smooth in his hands and smells too nice. Still, he lets himself take it from Lazarus, tentatively parting the folds to find a wad of tens and twenties, wrinkled from staying hidden in the masked one’s jeans.

“You are going to go inside,” Lazarus begins as they lean closer to Jay. They speak slowly, each stretching vowel pissing Jay off more and more. He can /hear/ perfectly fine, and forgive him for being a little confused by their location. He isn’t the mastermind behind this mad dog chase or anything.

Not that he’s going to say any of that. He knows better now. 

“You are going to take the painting that depicts a forest that is on fire,” Lazarus continues, one hand clasped around the steering wheel. The other falls to Jay’s knee, gripping harder than necessary, right into the fucking nerves. “You will take it to the cashier, and you will buy it, regardless of how much it may cost. Then you are going to take it back to the car, and we will move on from there.”

They turn away, taking their hand with them. Jay mentally recites a grateful prayer to the higher powers and stretches his leg out to shake the pain from it. 

“That sounds extremely easy,” Jay observes. Too easy, honestly, but he keeps that to himself. “So why couldn’t you do this before? Unless you couldn’t until you stole the money you needed from me.”

The masked one’s knuckles blanch, white as a bone. They look to the empty road, staring into nothing in particular. Jay’s own knuckles pale over, his fistful of cash crinkling.

“You’re not going to tell me, are you?”

The chilly silence that follows is answer enough for Jay. He gives in and rolls his eyes, reaching to jerk at the car door handle. Lazarus apparently wants to piss him off further, considering they take their time in reaching for the switch on their door that pops all the car locks out of their hiding places.

It occurs to Jay that he’d be fucked if Lazarus decides to lock him in, but surely they would have taken advantage of that while he was asleep over the past few hours. Logic and paranoia do not play well together, though, and he couldn’t have stumbled out of the car any faster if he tried. 

His back facing Lazarus, he finally has time alone for the first time in-- shit, days, a mere few days, not even a week. This fucking debacle could have been going on for months and he wouldn’t have questioned that. Time stretches itself thin while he’s around Lazarus. 

Being away from them, even if it’s for a couple of moments while the masked one waits for him in the car, he’s finding it’s easier to breathe and simply /exist/. As an adult, Jay is aware that there are times where people are forced to work alongside individuals who are difficult and do not mesh well together.

This is something entirely different, at least he thinks so. This is a creature that genuinely hates him and is keeping him around because he might turn out to be useful. Being around /that/ for a majority of the day-- if not, his whole day, it can’t be any good for him. No wonder he’s exhausted.

He could walk away. Right now. Except Lazarus is in the car and could easily catch him. Calling the police seems like an option, though if he takes too long in the antique shop, the masked one might drive off before the cops can get here in time.

Jay’s heart is playing a horrid and painful beat along his ribcage, his insides a mass of twisting chaos while the world around him is soft and sweet, crickets chirping merrily to announce the oncoming night. A step taken looks to be like nothing out of the ordinary, though Jay is shocked that he can make himself move at all. He wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he collapsed onto the pavement and died to keep from living with this bullshit any longer.

Somehow he makes it up the steps and he’s opening the door to the antique shop, wind chimes jingling against the sides in greeting. 

His first impression is that the shop is as old as one would expect. Dust lays thick across a long mahogany counter, where an old fashioned cash register that reminds Jay of a typewriter sits unguarded. There aren’t enough shelves to accommodate everything that’s sitting rotting away in here. All the record disks are placed into one box, though that’s the only semblance of organization that this place has. Jay can imagine it’s only like this for the records with the hipsters and old timers snatching up all the records.

The rest of the merchandise: glass faced dolls, books missing their covers, vases that could fall over from the force of a small breeze, it all lays on the beige carpet in stacks or in haphazard rows on the bookshelves. 

Jay isn’t certain he’s welcome here. He can’t tell if the shop is even open. No cashier, nobody walking around the store and perusing the available items, just him and the empty stares of the dolls propped up on the counter, price tags wrapped around their ankles

Alright.

He came in here with a purpose and he might as well fulfill it. There are frames hanging on the walls, some of them bearing tags and others holding nothing but their art. They could be decoration, they could be for sale, or maybe even both, there’s no telling and nobody to ask.

But what Lazarus described to him stands out amongst the junk easily, because it’s the single painting that isn’t hanging up. It sits on the floor, tilted at an angle to keep it sitting up on its own. 

The forest that Lazarus spoke of is made up of black tree trunks with equally dark leaves and blue undertones. It’s hard to tell whether that’s due to the artist’s creativity or because of the fire blazing away at the middle of the woods. Orange and red streaks of paint make up the flames, licking away at the branches and devouring them whole. 

It’s not a special painting. Jay feels like he could make something like this, to be honest, as little time as he spent dabbling in an art minor back in college. Maybe he isn’t properly appreciative of art, though once upon a time he might have claimed to be as a film major that found beauty and importance in every single film, no matter how poorly made.

Regardless of his feelings towards it, this was what he was brought in here for, so he might as well try to do something about it. There isn’t a price tag attached to it, but he picks it up anyway, bringing it to the counter and carefully resting it on the surface. A bell sits next to the black metal cash register, and Jay taps at it once, dinging loudly in the stillness of the room.

A hallway stands at either side of the single large room, leading into rooms that are closed off by baby gates. No acknowledging noises or anything of the sort issues from the halls, so Jay strikes the bell again, twice this time, more insistent.

Nothing.

He strikes a third time, huffing and hoping to god that the third time’s a charm because shit he knows Lazarus is waiting for him and what will they think he’s up to, will they be angry with him, try to hurt him and show him what for, what--

“Sorry, dear, here I am!”

And right on cue is the sound of slippers shuffling against the floor, generating static electricity that attacks the old lady wearing said slippers when she unlocks the left baby gate’s metal lock. She yelps and swats at the gate, swearing under her breath, barely audible when her voice shakes beneath the weight of her every word.

“Dear, oh dear, I’m so sorry to have kept ya waiting, darling,” she apologizes, patting at her white curls and grinning widely at Jay. Her eyes twinkle, delight dancing in her dark pupils. “It’s just that for the past month or so we only get maybe one customer a day and I wasn’t expecting somebody so soon after that lovely couple.”

Jay plasters on a smile that he hopes looks sincere to the woman, though her vision doesn’t appear to be at its best even with wire glasses sitting on the bridge of her nose. He continues the act anyway, especially once she makes it to the spot behind the counter and is able to look him up and down. 

“You’re a new one around here, are you a tourist?”

“Yeah, actually,” Jay says since she’s not entirely wrong, really. He’s a tourist against his will. “And I was just looking at the sights is all and I thought I could bring home a… a souvenir for my mother.”

“Oh, you came to the right place then!” the woman squeaks her approval, nodding her head. “Though I can’t say ya came to the right state to look for sights-- y’all are only gonna see fields of grain and trees that go on for miles.”

Jay shrugs as though it doesn’t make a difference to him. It really doesn’t right now; the quicker they get through this bullshit chattering the better. The woman takes the painting and holds it up to the light, squinting at it over her glasses.

“Oh, we got this in last week, don’t think we’ve ever sold /anything/ this quickly before…”

Jay nods, trying his best not to seem as though he’s rushing her, but… he is rushing her, there’s no denying it. He nods through her incoherent mumbling, about ‘that boy’ and how he ought to have come up to the cashier and taken care of Jay. The man supposes there’s someone else in the store that he hasn’t seen yet, but that hardly matters to him. What matters is that his order is finally being rung up and he can get the fuck out of here.

“Actually, the boy, Brian, he’s the one who gave this to us, funny thing. Providing us with merchandise rather than getting rid of it like he’s ought to, hah.”

Oh.

There are a million Brians in the world. Yet Jay’s ears perk on instinct, and he’s wishing he knew college Brian’s, /his/ Brian’s last name. Or maybe he did know his last name, knew it at one point while they were working together. These days, his memories seem to be more and more slippery. Was there a conversation about working at an antique shop at any point? Any talk of antiques in general?

Jay’s brain resists him like a sputtering engine that won’t start, blanking entirely at the thought of Brian. The memory of the man is there. He remembers his sweet face and his constant smile, his kind demeanor, but he can’t reach further beyond that. A barrier stands between him and the rest that he knows is there, he remembers there is more when he once looked back on it with fondness.

A persistent ache presses at the walls of his skull from the inside of his head. He reaches to rub at his forehead, squinting up his eyes and looking away from the cashier. 

“Er, I think I should get going soon as I can,” he says, nodding to the painting. “Buses to catch and all. I don’t need a bag or anything, right?”

“Why are you asking me, you decide whether you need a bag or not,” the cashier teases while sliding the painting back to him. “If you really want my opinion, it’s a bit too large to fit in a bag, though we could try it if you really want--”

“No, no, that’s not necessary,” Jay blurts out. He snatches the painting up and holds it under his arm, quick to turn away from the cashier. His foot catches on a heap of paperback books, forcing him to hop out of the building and nearly land straight on his face. Blood leaks out from his palms where he scrapes them against the concrete, keeping him from further injury but he still draws in a shuddery breath at the sudden pain.

The painting lays upon the ground next to him, the frame cracked and the painting itself flopping out. Pushing himself up to sit, he stares at the broken pieces, his pained head taking its time in catching up with what just happened. 

Lazarus is going to kill him. That’s all he can think about as he gathers the pieces of wooden frame, gold paint chipped from scraping on the pavement. Lazarus will see the little tear in the edge of the painting, and they will decide he can’t even accomplish the simplest of tasks. Useless, useless, fucking useless--

“Get back in the car already!” 

Static tears Lazarus’ voice apart, setting off a ringing bell inside of Jay’s ears. He struggles to lift his head, staring wide eyed at the car. The masked one sits up straight, shoulders hunched and the engine chugging away.

“But--”

A long and drawn honk drowns out the rest of Jay’s words. The ringing in his head turns into a shriek and he nearly rips the painting and ruins it completely. He gathers it up against his chest just in time, leaving the frame behind and stumbling towards the car.

“Shit,” he utters, falling into his seat and feeling it jerk beneath him as Lazarus hits the gas. He clings to the painting, like a precious child, hands trembling. “I got the painting, why are we rushing, wh…”

Lazarus doesn’t spare him a second glance; their eyes are fixed on the road, and their knuckles are white as before, if not more. Their hands may be permanently locked around the wheel now with how hard they’re gripping onto it.

While only moments ago, Jay was certain that he would be leaving this place bearing a shiny new bruise to wear on his cheek, now he’s looking at Lazarus and… he can’t muster up any pity for the violent creature. But something weaker than that bubbles in the pit of Jay’s stomach, not quite pity but it could be if it were someone else.

Something’s got Lazarus freaked out. But as many answers as Lazarus has been giving him in terms of their personal life, he has a feeling he’s not going to find out what’s got their hackles raised.

Not anytime soon.

\--

A cursed object lays not a foot away from them. The fire it depicts in vibrant colors and harsh sweeping brush strokes might as well be real. Ashes are in their lungs, disturbed by the air they pull in with haggard gasps and fluttering back to the bottom as the false flakes do within snow globes. 

They are all pain and jostled nerves, reminding them of the body that they are forced to inhabit and what it does. 

The deed is done, though. They are safe. Both them and the boy at their side, holding the painting like it’s something precious and at the same time a harbinger of death. 

He does not speak a single word, his silence uncharacteristic and a relief. While not the brightest bulb of the bunch, maybe he has finally learned that saving one’s questions for later is the better options at times. Right now, if they opened this mouth and spoke, they are certain that nothing good would come out.

Breathe. Breathe in the clean air, expel the ashes from their body, rid themself of the horrors that hide inside of their rotting organs. They are safe, as safe as they can be when forces of nature are pressing in upon them, salivating, craving the blood of this vessel. 

There was a face in the window of the antique shop.

While the bumbling boy beside them was inside, taking his sweet time, they had the chance to look properly at the store. It has not changed since they came here last time, face left behind in the car for the sake of the delicate hearted locals. They expect that the wife of the store owner tended to Jay, just as she had tended to them when they came nosing in, hoping to find hints, clues to the next step to take.

They did not see the face of the wife in the window this time, though. 

This face was not wizened by years of life and hard work, and it was boyish, soft at the cheeks but chiseled and hard along the strong jaw. They know this face, and this face knows them-- and it knew the man that once sat in this body, carrying him through the times he could not stand on his own. Those same brown eyes nearly caught them drifting through the shop before, and that is reason enough to understand that they couldn’t go back in.

Today, the face looking at them through the store window was smiling. Not a smile of familiarity or pleasure at the sight of them. This was a smile befitting a wicked creature lusting for blood. 

They have seen far worse smiles out on the streets as knives carved through flesh solely for the opportunity of extra cash in the pocket.

But seeing it on this face only told them that they did the right thing in sending Jay into the shop. 

The painting must burn. That much is obvious. If it stays, an innocent one will find it and take it to their home, and an eyeless gaze will look out at the somebody from within the painted trees. That gaze will break out into reality, and another victim will be taken into a ghastly long fingered clutch.

That grinning face, why did it grin? Did he believe he would be free of the faceless one in selling the painting? Did he perhaps place it in the shop in the hopes of spreading the monster’s gaze throughout the world? 

Finding the truth to the matter is too risky, especially with Jay at their side now. 

Burning, burning everything lying in the path ahead, that’s what matters, that’s what they exist for now, their only purpose. They must take nature and show that it is wrong in allowing this to go on, letting this creature go on uncontrolled and held away from those it wishes to devour for no reason other than pleasure.

Burn it all away and the creature will fade from memory and from mind. 

They would have taken their lighter to the painting right there in the street, if they could have done it without eyes upon them. 

Instead they have the car motoring into a neighborhood they’ve never heard of or seen before. There are no children here, running after toys that roll into the street or parents chasing their clumsy spawn. Bricks are crumbling into useless heaps on the concrete, acting as a sign of death in a sharp contrast to their original purpose of containing life. The rolled down windows are letting in the stench of untouched garbage. Plastic bags stuffed full of rotting food and god knows what else lay out on the sidewalk.

This will work. Nobody is going to come up to the two of them here. Two strangers lurking around, playing with fire in an abandoned neighborhood? Humans can claim to be noble and virtuous, and they will bleat about it as loudly as they can up until their own safety comes into question.

The brakes screech when their foot crashes into it, insistent and unyielding to the resistance the car gives back. They ignore the narrowed blue eyes that fix upon their back as they turn away and head outside; Jay will be fine, he’ll get over the whiplash eventually.

He stumbles out to join them at their side, opening his mouth, likely forgetting his earlier attempt at silence. They don’t bother to wait for his rambling and quickly distract him by yanking the painting from his grip. It tears at the corner, prompting a dropped jaw from their wide eyed and yammering companion. Maybe he would have been less chatty if he had known that being careful with the painting was the last thing that he had to be doing.

That’s in the past now, though. Their eyes fix on the lighter they draw out from their inside pocket, flicking it, insistent and demanding though the liquid inside might be getting low, towards the very bottom. 

Paper burns easily. Thank god for that.

Thank god for the silence, thank god for the lack of eyes upon the pair of them standing in the middle of nowhere, thank god for fire, thank god for escape.

Thank god.


	9. Shaking Death's Hand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sarah drives home and discovers that Jay isn't the only one of the family to be displaced. Meanwhile, Lazarus looks back on their mistakes and beginnings, and finds they're softening somewhat for Jay... but at the same time, goddamn is he a handful.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for: Housefire, an off-hand reference to an alcoholic mother, implied child abuse, attempted suicide, firearms, and likely more that I missed. Lemme know if I did!

Sarah’s brain is nearly vibrating inside of her skull. The sound of sirens has yet to let up on her; it feels as though they’ve been on her tail for hours, following her as though to be sure she doesn’t forget that her little brother’s home just burnt down and that he has gone missing without a trace.

 

It’s hard to forget right now. Going sleepless for at least twenty hours now, she can’t help having a one-track mind. A wandering round of thoughts and worries might lead her off the road and, god, sleep is hovering there, right there, behind her eyelids.

 

That’s all the sirens are good for right now; the constant noise keeps her upright, forcing her to sit ramrod straight and watch her back. The last thing she needs right about now is to be on the side of the road, crushed up by the wheels of a humungous fire truck.

 

It’s been about ten minutes since she turned onto the last stretch of road leading to home. The whole time she’s been driving here, the wail of the trucks has been on her tail, insistent and demanding to be heard. Alongside the sirens comes an ominous sense of déjà vu that lays heavy in her gut.

 

She curls her fingers around the steering wheel, her nails carving out little indents into her palms.

 

(Anything, anything but that, that would mean this is anything but coincidence, this runs deeper than a stranger breaking into Jay’s home and leaving nothing but ashes behind.)

 

And yet-- yet, when the tower of smog rises up from the distance, painting itself across the darkening sky, Sarah doesn’t break down in a fit of furious tears or even flinch.

 

In fact, it settles the writhing beast that’s taken up residency inside of her. It makes sense to her, tells her that this isn’t based in mindless acts of violence and random evil. This fits into a puzzle, one that she can solve and put together if she really puts her mind to it.

 

And she’s going to. She’s going to find out who is after both her and her brother. Nobody comes after her and is allowed to think they can get away with it, especially not when Jay is involved, that poor clueless bastard.

 

Her car wheels squeak to a stop as she parks at the end of her street-- and it’s as though she’s witnessing a replay of her brother’s own neighborhood. Fire arches out of her windows, roaring hungrily, and her neighbors stand around, hands over their mouths, others looking on with rather bored frowns. The fire truck that comes barreling past her arrives just in time to complete the scene.

 

Her phone is reaching the end of its battery power when she picks it up from the passenger seat. Quick fingers scroll down to family contacts, where she keeps her parents’ number in spite of never using it if she can help it. She hits the appropriate button and brings the phone to her ear.

 

A single ring. That’s it.

 

It goes right to a woman’s voice, robotic and detached, a stark and painful contrast to the gravity of the situation: ‘This number has been disconnected.’

 

There’s no way her father had the money to go out and buy a new phone and thus received a new number and god knows what the hell her mother is up to. Always more and more of the same, never moving from the house and clinging to a bottle of wine if she was able to afford it that month.

 

They might not have been able to pay their phone bill this month is all, which wouldn’t exactly be a first, their track record dotted all over by accidents and little slips in memory.

 

Coincidences don’t have any place here, though. Nothing about this is plain and simple, no such thing as an accident, not when the fires took place at very nearly the same time.

 

Sarah’s phone lets out a dying cry, and when she pulls it away from her ear, the screen blips out.

 

She stares at it, mind gone as dark as the screen, blank. How ever long she sits there, she has no way of telling; her eyes remain on the phone, stuck in limbo. Determination to take down what has come into both her life and her brother’s is useful and good, but what use is it when she hasn’t any idea where to start?

 

A knock at her window is what jerks her from the mental stalemate. Pain prickles in her kneecap after her phone drops from her fingers and topples against her leg on the way down to the foot well. A bruise is surely going to surface there later but she ignores both the pain and the phone for now in favor of the cop standing outside her car.

 

“Miss, I need you to move your car immediately,” he asks, mustache unruffled by his speaking. His mouth is a firm line, stern as the situation would require him to be. “We’re clearing the street to make room for the emergency responders.”

 

Sarah licks her dry lip, providing no relief to it as the rest of her mouth has gone just as dry. Her brain lags, taking its time in concocting the right sort of response. The officer frowns, what is visible of his face behind his sunglasses filling in with harsh lines. He opens his mouth, about to speak when Sarah interrupts.

 

“I’m sorry, sir, but, that’s my house. I believe I have a right to be here.”

 

His mouth stays open, jaw dropping. Clearly, that wasn’t the response he was expecting. She stares up at him, challenge in her own set jaw and the hands that are clenched in her lap.

 

After a moment of silence and puzzled frowns, the cop steps back, opening the car door for her.

 

“I’m-- I’m so sorry, ma’am. Please step out of the car.”

 

Although it seems all the writhing creatures of the world have come to reside in the pit of her sick stomach, Sarah can’t keep from smirking to herself, a faint glow of victory hidden beneath the chaos inside of her. She takes her time in getting out of the car, one foot after the other. Once she’s standing, she crosses her arms over her chest and looks up at the police officer, narrowed eyes expectant.

 

“So I hope you’re looking to help me out here. Because I’ve been having a really fucking awful day, as I think you can tell.”

 

The officer nods, Adam’s apple bobbing against his throat.

 

“Good. Now, mind telling me what I’m supposed to do first?”

 

Sarah looks on as he props his hands against his hips, fingering his radio, but never actually going to use it. His forehead is slick with sweat now, though whether that’s to do with nerves or the powerful blaze a good couple of yards away is up to debate.

 

“I think… for now, you need to come with me.”

 

As lost as Sarah is, that’s all she can think to do-- and so, she doesn’t protest, despite her earlier certainty that involving the police would only get in the way.

 

So long as she has an idea of what she has to do next, she’ll be fine.

 

She has to be, or she has to admit that the fucker behind these fires has won, and she would sooner give up ever stepping foot on stage again.

 

\--

 

_This day begins as any other day would._

_You open eyes that are not your own. They sting and prickle as you squint, ruined by overexertion the night before. Not your fault you couldn’t sleep. It’s never your fault._

_Cramps have snuck their way into your muscles, right into your knees. That is your fault; you slept with these legs propped at a peculiar angle against the door, not enough of a right angle to save you from the aches. Black spots that will trickle into blue are surely going to appear on those poor knees. Pain is an unavoidable beast here, though. You’ve tried a thousand different sleeping positions, back on the wall, legs in the air, back to the mattress and legs curled up against your body, so on and so forth._

_This closet is out to get you and rob you of any creature comforts you might crave in secret, never telling another soul. Fuck this closet and all it stands for, though it is the only place you allow yourself to rest._

_The overturned couch in the next room over is impossible to move on your own, and something is living underneath it anyway. You don’t know what it is, but going by the blood curdling screams it emits whenever you approach, it doesn’t want to give up its hiding place to you._

_So, you’ve hounded away a single couch cushion to the closet that you can miraculously lock from the inside, and that’s that._

_But, yes, it’s a normal morning to you, though a quick peek outside shows you that it isn’t morning by the dictionary definition. There’s no simple way of telling what time it is; the clocks running on batteries here died a long time ago, and electricity is by far a thing of the past. You’ve only got the sun on your side, and it’s painting the beige-gone-brown carpets by the front door a sleepy golden orange._

_Evening will be upon you soon enough._

_Yes, today could be normal by every right, you could be chasing terrors around your brain for hours upon hours and waking up in a cold sweat that’s soaking your rancid clothing, collapsed in a room that you know you weren’t in before. You might go darting out in the middle of the night, break into cars that have food right out in the open, all for the taking._

_But today is going to be different._

_Everybody has a breaking point. Poor Tim, he had one, and it was met with long ago. A boy can’t carry the world upon his shoulders forever, and what was pressing into his frail human body held more weight than any normal human could handle._

_When people reach that breaking point, they respond in many ways, a good number of them self-destructive. Tim… his response fell beneath that. Indeed, he hasn’t emerged for many days, sleeping deep and allowing another being to take over the shell of a body he never wanted anyway. It’s a sleep that is anything but restful. It is something that is akin to death, falling short of it in that Tim is still there, can still hear what is going on around him, can see and can feel and can think._

_He simply chooses not to take any of it in._

_You have learned from his mistakes. You refuse to crack and lock yourself away. Nothing changes when you do that; all that happens is that you leave yourself vulnerable to having this body transformed into a puppet and used to drag others down into this monster-born mess._

_You won’t be a part of that._

_You’re going to be the one to stop it. You’ll give Tim the peace he deserves, that every person deserves after being touched by the creature’s presence._

_The weapon is right where you left it, beneath your sleeping cushion, just in case the beast decided to pop by while you were catching up on rest. It is not light by any means, sitting as a solid mass within these hands. Beautiful silver that gleams under the sunlight, a full round of bullets sleeping inside, waiting… it’s perfect._

_This house is filled to the brim with secrets, awaiting discovery, day by day. These secrets take many forms: journals that speak of names that are in no way familiar to you but they cause Tim to stir, newspapers telling the stories of missing children and the woods that they vanished into, old trinkets you feel no logical attachment to but you hoard them away anyway- it goes on._

_What you hold in these calloused hands is one of those secrets. How this weapon came to be here, you’ll never know, even though Tim murmurs from the back of your shared headspace every time you touch it._

_You don't need any further preparation. The weapon is ready, ready as you have been for these past weeks after suffering through the nightmares and the taste of blood upon your lips._

_Your face dangles upon the closet door handle, right where you left it. Taking it by the string, you stretch the band over your head and behind your ears, and you're you again. The face of a creature that only requires the essentials; a mouth to speak with and eyes to see those who may be listening._

_Crickets greet you as you step out of the house that belongs not to you but might as well be called yours anyway. Out here, the structure is standing tall and proud. Not a single chip in the paint or a missing brick. To the unassuming outsider, this home is just like any other-- thank goodness there's no way to see the rotten insides._

_Grass tickles at the bare bottoms of these feet. Rain seeps between these toes and dampens the knees of your jeans as you lower yourself down to sit in the very middle of the front lawn._

_Silence. All is silent here, no tree branches shuddering in the wind, no screaming tomcats fighting to claim territory, no more songs for the crickets to sing._

_It knows, nature knows, the very way of the world knows what work you are doing here and it is sitting in anticipation, holding its breath._

_The creature comes when it chooses to come, and it will find you anywhere, follow you to the ends of the earth just to prove that it can. If you waited long enough inside of the house, it would surely arrive eventually, as it always does._

_But to place yourself out in the open like this is too fucking tempting. It's out of your routine, too strange. You would sooner lock yourself in the closet than stand in the forest, playing host to the thousands of trees it could be waiting behind._

_Curiosity is a powerful force, one that even a monster like the faceless god cannot resist._

_Sure enough, the air grows thick and you have to work to breathe. Shadows creep closer, hands reaching out through the oncoming night to pin you down. Where there was sunlight glowing a moment ago is now a glob of thick fog that wraps around you, sucking the oxygen from the air._

_You stand, clutching at the weight sitting in your jacket pocket. Cool metal has gone hot with the body heat that is not your own. It burns against this skin, eager to carry out its purpose._

_As though on cue, something akin to a rattling breath being drawn carries through the air, and it's there. Black upon black, its great moonish head hangs over you, a second satellite to the earth. The rest of it inches into focus, its skin bearing its usual parody of human formality._

_Its impossible stare fixes upon you, daring you to run, flinch, scream and break apart at the edges. You stand firm, though its presence presses back at you, trying to push you to your knees. This isn’t the full extent of the freak’s power; if it really wanted you on the ground, it would break your fighting bones and let your crumple._

_This is a test, not an actual threat. It wants to figure out why you have come so willingly into its midst._

_If you could, you would laugh. Not once has it ever seemed more human; curious, confused, probing for answers that it will receive too late. But you have not gained a grasp upon this borrowed voice yet, and when you part your lips, you utter crackly words, ripped apart by static and interference._

_This is it. You don’t hesitate any longer. Waiting around for it to catch on won’t serve you any good. Theatrics have no place here when not only your life, but Tim’s as well is in danger._

_You draw the gun from your jacket, warm and heavy, and you aim, barrel tilted up at the creature’s round head. The damn thing is too tall for you to touch the gun’s end to its non-face, but you know you can’t miss when it’s this close._

_It tilts its head to the side, as though questioning you, and you answer it with your finger, flexing and pulling back the trigger._

_Even Tim reels back inside of you at the great cracking boom that bursts out from your hand, and you stumble, feet sliding against the grass. Toes digging into the dirt, you manage to remain upright, but only just; the creature has lost its grasp and can’t repress its power as it was doing a moment ago. Pressure closes in on quaking muscles, and this time you can’t fight it. You kneel, gasping past the flood of sticky liquid dripping into these lungs. It dribbles out and leaks, splattering the earth with dark crimson explosion clouds._

_Then--_

_You don’t want to believe it, your vision isn’t as it ought to be, brain scrambled up and sliding this way and that, knocking against the walls of this skull but_

_You still see it_

_It is standing_

_Over you_

_No. No. You refuse. This isn’t supposed to happen. Everything can die, everything will die, one way or another, including this fucking monster, still standing over you as though you didn’t shove a bullet straight through its goddamn brain-- or at least where a brain ought to be._

_You tug the trigger, again and again, shooting wild and without abandon. Ringing screeches out from within you, there are bells inside your mind that are disturbed by every shot you take. One, two, three, you lose count, you don’t know how many times you do it, but it should be enough._

_Somehow you’ve fallen onto your rump, one hand out behind you to keep you from lying completely against the ground. Gunpowder hangs onto your inhaled breath and you cough it back out, soaked with more blood._

_Your vision takes its time in clearing, the damp curtains that settled over your eyes draining out over Tim’s cheeks. When you can see again, you see nothing but the night sky and the forest that sits out on the horizon. As fast as those violent moments felt, they must have been so much longer for the sun to have completely abandoned you._

_It’s quiet, though the ringing that has yet to leave you begs to differ. Quiet, but, the pressure the monster brings everywhere it goes has yet to lift._

_You hope against hope. You pray, you fucking pray to any higher beings that might pity you enough to listen that this feeling is merely something it left behind while dying, that it’ll go away eventually, as the smell of a corpse does once the source is removed._

_But--_

_You see it again, see it hovering over you, and there’s screaming in your ears-- no, static, more static-- but you can dig through the cacophony of noise and pick up a sound that goes straight to your heart, sharp and deep._

_It’s laughing at you._

_It knew that you were going to fail and it stuck around solely to rub that in. And just to make the point sink in, it lifts a boney hand and your every nerve bursts into flames. Muscles tight, uncontrollable spasms, gasping for breath that won’t, can’t come to you, breathe, breathe, /breathe/--_

_Then it’s all gone._

_This body doesn’t know what to do now that the sensory overload is gone; is this what fish feel like upon being ripped from the ocean? The skin remains twitching and the aroma of damp soil is overwhelming, mixing with the copper at the back of this throat and you’re gagging, barely remembering to roll over and spit it out to keep from choking._

_Now that you’re lying here in a broken heap, you have to wonder what the fuck you were thinking. Why would this work? A creature as old as time itself, in the /south/ at that, and nobody else has attempted to shoot it down before? Please._

_That’s it._

_If you can’t get rid of it, then there’s only one way of escape. One you had been avoiding, one that Tim has attempted to take before but you dragged him back kicking and screaming. You had hope then, thought you could find another way out. That was your job._

_And you’ve failed._

_You click the gun open, and check the insides. There’s one more bullet._

_And there’s only one head left here to bury it in._

 

\--

 

A spot of hairless skin at the back of Lazarus’ head stands out, none too obvious to the oblivious passerby, though to them it’s like a loose tooth they cannot stop tonguing at. They run their hand over it, again and again, a bad habit that needs breaking. Surely this isn’t helping the hairs to grow back as they ought to.

 

Or, perhaps this spot will forever remain scarred and naked, a reminder of their mistakes.

 

They look back to the bathroom mirror they’re standing before, Tim’s face frowning back at them. There in the reflective glass is a man who just went on a wild dash through a rainstorm. Water drips from his hair even after a towel has been roughly run over it, and droplets stream down his bare body, forming a miniature lake at his feet.

 

This poor man. They’ve abused his body, heedless of its needs, annoyed that it has needs at all. Although, running through a torrential downpour to get inside a motel building is hardly the worst thing Lazarus has done to this body.

 

Lazarus reaches for a second towel, the first one they used now lying in the moldy tub, soaked to its limits. They pause upon seeing that this is the only towel left, and, well, it doesn’t matter, they should use it and be done with it, but.

 

There’s a shivering man out on one of the beds, back in the other room. He’s completely drenched, his clothes sagging and showing off the youth that clings to his body. Skinny limbs, skinny legs, a pouty face, he could still be sixteen years old and Lazarus would believe it.

 

Really, shouldn’t matter. Just because some idiot decided to be nosey and get caught up in this mess doesn’t mean Lazarus should change their rules of living: take and take and take, it’s the only way to survive most days.

 

But they think of the exhaustion in the boy’s eyes. Hollow purple craters, bruise-like, never changing despite constantly passing out in the car. On the way here from the antique shop, he practically coughed up a lung.

 

That’s exactly what Lazarus needs; an annoying partner getting sick and catching pneumonia from the cold clinging to his bones. He’d be nothing more than a useless lump curled up at the back of the car. No more sending him into places like the antique shop, places that are forbidden to Lazarus because they would recognize the face that they’re borrowing.

 

They leave the towel behind. If they have to be drippy and drenched for a while, then so be it.

 

Dry towel left draped over the shower rod, Lazarus leaves their clothing in the tub (at least these… Batman boxers are fairly dry) and grabs their face from the sink, pulling it back on and glancing at their reflection again. A mostly unclothed body plus a mask doesn’t make much sense, but laying around in their sopping clothing isn’t going to make sense either, if they’re hoping to keep from catching ill as well.

 

And, as though he could hear their thought process, who is it that’s doing /just that/ back in the room?

 

Jay couldn’t have waited another five minutes before passing out. He rests sprawled across the bed furthest from the bathroom, like even in his half-conscious state he was attempting to put as much distance between him and Lazarus as possible. A grey outline is forming around his body, water seeping from his clothing and into the sheets. His face is buried in the pillows, and Lazarus would worry about him suffocating in his sleep if it weren’t for the easy rise and fall of his back. Apparently sleeping like that is an art and Jay has mastered it. If only he were that talented in other ways.

 

How very tempting it is to scream the boy awake and to direct him to the bathroom. But this is the end of Lazarus’ patience; it has been one of the longest days they’ve had in months and they can’t be bothered to fuss over every stupid mistake the boy makes. If he wants to wake up shaking and whining about the chill he left to settle in his bones, so be it, but he better keep it to himself.

 

They approach the single lamp in the room-- one that has a flickering light bulb that can scarcely illuminate the tiny fucking room, thanks-- and switch it off. The remaining bed creaks beneath Lazarus’ weight, and for a moment they fear that the frame is going to break and it’ll all be one more problem that they have to deal with.

 

Luckily, the bed stays stable, or stable as it can. They lay back against the off-white sheets that were obviously once white, the scent of too much detergent rolling off of it in waves.

 

How long has it been since they met eyes with Tim’s old friend like that? Too long, painfully long, especially in knowing that they weren’t looking at Brian anymore, and with that in mind, they can only hope that they never have to catch his stare again.

 

Worse yet, Jay would have too many questions that they cannot answer. Why is he different, why is he here, why won’t you approach him… It’s a miracle that he didn’t bump into the man while bumbling about inside the antique shop. Hell, it’s an amazing acrobatic feat of determined unobservant behavior that he didn’t see that shell of a man standing in the window while they were leaving.

 

Maybe Lazarus should be grateful that Jay isn’t the cleverest man out there, irritating as it can be.

 

Those types of people are easier to handle and keep on a short leash. And as soon as this is all over, Lazarus can unclip said leash and let Jay go galloping off into the wild, free to be an unconscious man who never leaves the confines of his apartment.

 

And that’s that. Lazarus can tolerate his bullshit, just for as long as this goes on, and then they never have to think about him again. So he can have that towel, he can give them all the sidelong untrusting glances he wants.

 

He won’t have to do it forever. Life will go on and they will both be better for all the fuss.


End file.
